Stepping out of the reed boat, the woman’s feet sank deep into the mud. It was thick, black stuff, the fine, fertile Nile silt deposited by the river’s annual floods. The river had only just started to fall after months of rising waters; soon, it would be time to start sowing the fields on either bank. There was still a little time to spare before the work began in earnest.

The mud oozed up to the woman’s ankles and squelched with every step. Dragging the boat away from the bank to drier land took effort, especially when the little reed craft was loaded full of baskets of grain. But the workers at the building site needed to eat, and that meant straining her back and getting thick clods of soil stuck all over her feet.

When the boat was finally out of the mud, she nearly collapsed from exhaustion. Bending at the waist and bracing her hands on her hips, she stopped to catch a few deep breaths. Every one of her forty years seemed to stab at her aching hands, legs, and joints, punishing her for the endless days of toil that made up her daily life. Grinding grain was the worst, a neverending punishment for the wrists and fingers. Carrying water from the river was a close second. Paddling a boat and pulling it onto the riverbank wasn’t nearly as bad as those two interminable tasks, which was why she had volunteered to bring their village’s grain downstream to the building site, but it still took its toll.

Subscribe to Past Lives on your platform of choice, or listen here:

Everything did. Her hair, which had been thick and black in her younger years, had thinned dramatically after six pregnancies and a lifetime of physical labor. What was left was mostly gray. Her right ankle had never healed correctly after that time a donkey’s hoof came down on it at an odd angle. That one tooth in the back of her mouth was giving her trouble again, and a growing pain in her abdomen sometimes kept her up at night.

But at least she was alive and moving. Her belly was full of porridge and thick, tasty beer. The late-autumn sun wasn’t too hot on her exposed face and neck. The flood had been good this year, promising a rich crop at harvest time. She flicked a clod of that thick mud off her foot: Kemet, she thought, the Black Land. That earth, even more than the kings who mediated between her people and the gods, whose visages stared down from enormous statues and whose names were constantly repeated by administrators and priests, was really Egypt.

Break

Hello, my friends, and welcome to another episode of Past Lives. I’m your host, Patrick Wyman. Thanks so much for joining me today.

When we think about ancient human remains, particularly mummified remains, the first place our minds reach for is Egypt. There are two reasons for this. The first is the centrality of ancient Egypt in our - and I’m using “our” loosely here - understanding of human history: The fact that the pyramids, temples, and tombs are still visible today, some of the oldest monuments still in close proximity to where people live now, certainly plays a role in that. So too does the continuous presence of European archaeologists in Egypt for the better part of two centuries. Hieroglypic writing was deciphered 200 years ago, thanks to the Rosetta stone. Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt created a craze for Egyptian-style designs and even furniture across Europe early in the 19th century, and since then, Egypt has never really left the popular consciousness. On top of that, much of what we take for granted about how archaeology works and what it can tell us comes from excavations carried out in Egypt. It’s hardly uncommon to read a new report on a recent dig and see a section about excavations carried out at the same site in the 19th or early 20th centuries.

By the standards of the ancient world, we know Egypt extremely well. We have copious artifacts scattered in museums around the world: I was in Florence, Italy recently, and even the small archaeological museum there has an extraordinary collection of ancient Egyptian objects, sarcophagi, and mummies. There are dozens of places like that museum in Florence, the product of decades of constant excavation and a healthy, if not entirely ethical, market in Egyptian antiquities. Unlike most times and places long ago, we have an almost complete list of Egyptian kings from around 3000 BC - the first being Narmer - all the way down to the last ruler of an independent Egypt, a woman by the name of Cleopatra. You might have heard of her. Even more striking is the fact that the earliest rulers in Upper Egypt would have immediately understood the visual and ideological language of kingship in Cleopatra’s time, a sign of the general cultural and political conservatism and stability that Egypt enjoyed throughout that long age.

We’re talking about nearly 3,000 years of continuous history, from the earliest pharaohs who rose in Upper Egypt all the way to the Kushites, Persians, and Macedonians who ruled the country before it finally became a Roman province. Not every age is perfectly documented, especially the eras known as “Intermediate Periods” that lie between the major divisions of Egyptian history. We know far more about the elite than we do the ordinary people who farmed fields near the Nile and worked on the construction sites that became famous monuments. Some regions are much better understood than others: Our knowledge of the Nile Valley is far superior to our understanding of the Delta, for example. The long history of archaeological and historical work in and about Egypt sometimes makes this particular field of study insular and resistant to change; Egyptology is a separate discipline from either history or archaeology, with its own training programs and ways of doing things. Despite the copious human remains from ancient Egypt, for example, we have few genetic or isotopic studies of the kind that are remaking our understanding of other ancient societies. Even so, the sheer amount we can and do know about the land of the pharaohs is mind-boggling. From the precise methods of construction used on the Great Pyramid to the religious program of a zealous reformer to the lives of the people who built the tombs in the Valley of the Kings, the information we have about ancient Egypt is as abundant and rich as the Nile.

For the next several episodes of Past Lives, we’re going to linger in Egypt and meet some of the people who lived there over the thousands of years that separated Narmer and Cleopatra. We’ve already encountered one ancient Egyptian, Gebelein Man, who lived before the first kings rose to rule the land from the Cataracts to the Mediterranean. But we would be remiss if we didn’t also talk about some of the other, extraordinarily well-preserved individuals from this extremely well-documented time and place. To do that, however, it’s helpful to familiarize ourselves with the broad patterns of ancient Egypt’s history, and that’s what we’ll discuss here today.

The basic continuity of Egyptian civilization from before 3000 BC to 30 BC is so obvious as to be a cliche, but that doesn’t mean nothing ever changed; very much the opposite. A great deal did change over time, from the identities of the ruling kings to the structure of the state to the geographic orientation of the country as a whole. Squaring 3,000 years of incremental change with a deep, foundational conservatism is the challenge that everyone discussing the long run of ancient Egypt’s history has to face, and there are no easy answers. Do we choose to emphasize the unbroken seque nce of kings, the similarities in religious expression and language, and the consistent unity of the Nile Valley and Delta? Or should we instead focus on the constant introduction of new deities, the success of rulers of foreign extraction, or the tensions that just as constantly threatened to break the perilous unity of the Valley and Delta, and often succeeded in doing so? Balancing adaptation and flexibility with deeply rooted conservatism was the Egyptian way, and any decent accounting of Egypt’s history requires an understanding of both.

As we discussed a while back in our episode on Gebelein Man, Egypt wasn’t always ruled by a single king. In fact, Egypt as a concept didn’t exist before the reign of Narmer, the man generally held as having united Egypt sometime around 3000 BC. I say “sometime,” because the exact chronology of Egyptian history…isn’t. We have to wait until the period we call the New Kingdom, starting around 1570 BC, for more precise calendar dates. Prior to Narmer, or whoever was the first unifying king back in the mists of time, there was no “Egypt,” only the Nile Valley and the Nile Delta. Archaeologically, we know far less about the Delta than the Valley. In the Delta, the constant movements of the Nile, its flooding and channel-shifting, have buried surface signs of a great many archaeological sites under thick layers of silt. This phenomenon is also true in the Nile Valley, at least close to the river, where the annual floods deposited tonnes of soil every year when the waters rose. It was this fertile new soil that gave Egypt its name: Kemet, the Black Land, as opposed to Deshret, the Red Land, the arid desert that brackets the river.

Away from the immediate flood zone, the Nile Valley is an archaeological paradise. It’s one of the most heavily investigated and excavated places on the planet, with an unbroken and well-documented sequence of material culture stretching all the way back to the Neolithic. But for most of the prehistory of the region, the Valley and the Delta didn’t form a natural pair. The Delta was more tightly connected to happenings in western Asia and Libya than to the long, thin river valley. The Nile Valley’s more natural orientation was south, past the Cataracts - the series of rapids that break up the river near Egypt’s present-day border - and into what is now Sudan. Cultural mores and subsistence patterns extended up and down the river from what would eventually become Upper Egypt all the way south to Khartoum, where the Nile’s two major tributaries meet; while we know less about what was happening in the surrounding desert, these same groups probably ventured out into what we know was then a much greener and more welcoming landscape. Rather than being a land of village-dwelling farmers, the Nile Valley was occupied mostly by mobile pastoralists, cattle-herders who moved from place to place and settled down only in death.

We know these people largely from their cemeteries, where they buried their dead in elaborate fashion with everything they had worn and used in life. Because cattle-herding pastoralists moved around a great deal in search of fresh pastures for their herds, they communicated their identities - who they were and what groups they belonged to - through their bodies: jewelry, hair decorations, body paints, makeup, clothing, and quite probably scarification and tattooing as well. Upon interment, the deceased had to showcase all of those aspects of their identity to the surviving members of their community. Items like combs, palettes and brushes for applying paints, and necklaces and anklets made from rare stones, gems, and seashells were common inclusions. Whatever they had with them at the time of burial would remain with them in their afterlives forever. The prominence of cemeteries and the emphasis on the body as the major site of identity display would have a long afterlife. As the Nile Valley became one of the two constituent parts of Egypt, the centrality of the dead and the body wound their way into the developing DNA of Egyptian culture.

By around 3800 BC, when the Badarian Era gave way to what archaeologists call the Naqada period, farming was replacing pastoralism throughout the Nile Valley. Populations were rising. Permanent settlements were becoming towns, if not yet cities. Powerful men, perhaps the descendants of the old pastoralist chieftains, were carvin g out a place for themselves at the top of an increasingly explicit social hierarchy. By roughly 3200 BC at the latest, those chieftains had begun to think of themselves as kings. Three towns, each with its own petty ruler, stood above the rest: Hierakonpolis, Naqada, and Abydos. Each of them built increasingly substantial tombs for themselves that they packed with rich grave goods. The earliest examples of hieroglyphic writing come from these tombs, symbols of the increasing power and sophistication of the Nile Valley chieftains. They competed with one another for prestige and territory, and when they weren’t fighting each other, they fought their still-pastoralist neighbors living to the south along the Nile. This was the time when Upper Egypt separated, both culturally and politically, from the similar regions and peoples who lived nearby; as much as the political unification of the Delta and the Valley, it was this severance that created the boundaries of Egypt as we understand it.

Break

One of the beefs I have with popular presentations of ancient Egyptian history is this idea that it’s all orderly and precise: We know who the kings were, when they ruled, when dynasties fell and why, and we should expect centralized power will one day appear again after periods of fragmentation and disunity. It’s just not how any of this works! Nowhere are these issues clearer than with the earliest stages of Egyptian statehood, what we call the Early Dynastic period. According to the Egyptian historian Manetho, who lived nearly 3,000 years after the unification of Egypt and on whom we rely for our basic outline of Egyptian history, the first king was named Menes; but the first king we see wearing the distinctive crown of both Upper and Lower Egypt, on a fascinating image called the “Narmer Palette,” is a man named Narmer. Narmer and Menes may have been different names for the same person - Egyptian kings had a variety of appellations - or Menes may have been Narmer’s successor. The combination of radiocarbon dating and estimates from written sources tells us that these two kings, whatever their actions or relationship to one another, lived between roughly 3100 BC and 3000 BC. And to be clear, we have no real idea what the “unification” of Egypt actually entailed, how much progress previous kings had made toward that goal, or what steps remained to be taken after the reign of Narmer-slash-Menes. It presumably involved conspicuous violence, or alternatively, kings like Narmer wanted to portray their takeover as a violent process: The Narmer Palette contains one of the earliest examples of the “smiting scene,” which depicted the ruler ceremonially beating a captive, while a decorated macehead from Narmer’s reign records quantities of plunder taken during his campaigns. While these scenes were idealized, there’s no reason to think unification was a peaceful, much less welcomed, event.

From the time of Narmer, kings were depicted wearing the distinctive crowns of both Upper and Lower Egypt: Visually and ideologically, we can say that Egypt had been unified. What that meant on the ground, for the people living under the rule of these earliest pharaohs, is harder to say. There’s no noticeable difference between the tomb of Narmer and his immediate predecessors in Abydos, who belong to what Egyptologists call “Dynasty Zero.” It’s possible that most or all of the work had been done before Narmer ever took the throne, and later Egyptians chiseled away the messy bits to make a cleaner story.

Over the next several centuries, however, Egypt transformed into the state and society we in the present are most familiar with. Royal tombs became enormous constructions that took years or even decades to build. These sometimes included human sacrifices, what are euphemistically called “retainer burials” in the academic literature. The king became the focal point for Egyptian society as a whole, standing at the top of a unified hierarchy. By virtue of that topmost position, the pharaoh gave order and meaning to those below him: If not actually a god himself, he was at least adjacent to divinity, semi-divine, much closer to the gods than his counterparts in the cities of Mesopotamia at that same time. Because of their near-divinity, Egyptian kings played an essential role as mediators between the gods and their human subjects. The gods spoke directly to the kings and guided their actions in accordance with their will, and the people’s service made it possible for the kings to fulfill this role.

This was the proper order of things, and order - channeled through the kings - was perhaps the most central concept in the Egyptians’ understanding of the world and how it was supposed to work. Their word for this proper order was Maat, associated with light, and the concept was personified in a goddess of that same name. Maintaining the correct relationship between the people and the gods was one foundational aspect of Maat; the other was triumphing over foreign enemies, because proper order obviously involved Egypt being kept safe from the darkness and chaos - Isfet - that represented Maat’s polar opposite and threatened Egypt on all sides. While we have practically no details of military campaigning during this period, the Early Dynastic saw the end of the pastoralist cultures that had existed around the Cataracts of the Nile for centuries: The Nubian A-Group, as these pastoralists are known, were surely victims of Egyptian state-building.

By the dawn of the Old Kingdom, the period we understand to be Egypt’s first great golden age, the outlines of the ancient Egyptian state, society, and culture had all been drawn. The transition from the Early Dynastic to the Old Kingdom happened around 2700 BC, as the Second Dynasty to rule Egypt gave way to the Third, headed by a fellow named Djoser. You may have heard of Djoser—he was the first king to build a pyramid.

The pyramids are probably the most instantly recognizable expression of ancient Egypt. For at least 3,000 years, the Great Pyramid of Giza was the largest building on the planet, an eternal reminder of the power and will of the pharaohs. While singular in its majesty, it wasn’t alone: Throughout the Old Kingdom, rulers and their immediate family members constructed pyramids to serve as their tombs, bending the resources of a vast—and vastly wealthy—kingdom to this overarching task. Later kings built pyramids as well, but the pharaohs of the Middle Kingdom used less durable mud-brick instead of stone and those of the Kushite kings are much smaller. Pyramid-building and the Old Kingdom are essentially synonymous: Djoser, the founder of the Old Kingdom, built the first, while the last major stone construction was that of Pepy II, the last of the Old Kingdom to rule all of Egypt.

This isn’t an accidental correlation. It wasn’t aliens or secret advanced technology that built the pyramids, but the combined efforts of hundreds of thousands of workers over the course of decades. People were moved en masse by the power of the Egyptian state to building sites, where they were provided with food, tools, and raw materials drawn from the distant corners of the country to provide for and shelter them as they labored. To aid the transportation of goods to Giza, for example, Egyptian engineers built a new river harbor on a now-extinct branch of the Nile. Copper for chisels came from the Sinai. Other materials were sourced from a specially built port on the Red Sea. All of those workers weren’t farming while they were cutting limestone and fixing copper tools, so their food had to come from somewhere; that meant administrators had to oversee the collection and shipment of grain and other staples. The Egyptian state did far more than build tombs during the days of the Old Kingdom, but there is no better sign of the capabilities of that state than the pyramids themselves.

But while its monuments remain enshrined in our public consciousness, the Old Kingdom didn’t last forever. Around 2200 BC, a combination of internal fragmentation and climatic pressure caused by a major episode of aridification - the 4.2ka Event - brought an end to the Old Kingdom and inaugurated the First Intermediate Period. Instead of a single unified state, Egypt split into multiple smaller-scale kingdoms, each with its own ruling dynasty and geographic center of power. This wasn’t a brief interlude, but approximately 125 years, or four or five generations, in which there was no centralized state ruling the country. Two distinct centers of power emerged: Memphis in the north, and Thebes in the south. For much of this period, local leaders controlled their own districts, with as many as 22 petty kings ruling each of Egypt’s administrative divisions, called nomes. It’s possible, though not certain, that populations declined drastically throughout the Nile Valley during this period, a sign of serious economic and social stress. Eventually, the Theban rulers succeeded in extending their control over all of Egypt, inaugurating the beginning of Egypt’s second golden age: the Middle Kingdom.

The Middle Kingdom wasn’t a rerun of the Old Kingdom. Times had changed. When we look at the wide variety of media produced during the Middle Kingdom - visual, literary, ideological - the opposition between order and chaos, Maat and Isfet, becomes much more stark. It’s as if the demise of the Old Kingdom shattered some kind of civilizational self-confidence; now Egyptians knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that chaos could, in fact, triumph over the forces of order, that pharaohs weren’t all-powerful, that the solidity of their lives and world were merely illusions. The founding ruler of the Middle Kingdom, a man named Mentuhotep II, was the first pharaoh to be deified while he was still alive, rather than posthumously, as was common during the Old Kingdom; he was also the first pharaoh to be depicted in one of those famous smiting scenes, bashing his defeated Egyptian - rather than foreign - enemies with a mace. The Old Kingdom had seen its share of war, of course, but the pharaoh’s role as a bulwark against the outside world became much stronger during the Middle Kingdom. Mentuhotep II fought against Nubians living along the Nile to the south, Libyans living to the west of the Delta, the desert people living to the east of the Nile between the river and the Red Sea, and probably even led an expedition into southern Palestine. Unlike the long-ruling dynasties of the Old Kingdom, Mentuhotep II’s line lasted for only a few decades after his death, and the Twelfth Dynasty that followed came to the throne amid yet another period of disorder. Their pyramids, built of mud-brick rather than stone, were smaller and less durable.

Yet the Middle Kingdom was no less successful than the Old, despite the lack of enduring and easily identifiable monuments. Its priorities were simply different—they had to be, because the world itself wasn’t the same. Aside from royal monuments, which quickly replaced the self-directed constructions of regional elites, the most stunning examples of Middle Kingdom architecture are the fortresses built to protect the country’s borders. New gods came to the fore: This was the period when Osiris became the most important deity for most Egyptians, for example. Egyptian literature flourished for the first time, as the rulers of the Middle Kingdom and their courts patronized poets and authors of wisdom literature. One of my favorite texts from this period is entitled “A Debate Between a Man and His Soul,” and there’s a section I really like about the impermanence of life: “The gods who existed previously, who rest in their pyramids; the effective privileged likewise, who rest in their pyramids— their enclosures were built, but their places are no more … their walls are lost and no more, their places like that which has not come into being … Let your heart be informed about it, but let your heart forget about it: it is useful for you to follow your heart while you exist.” It’s as if to say, even though you know everything must end, you can’t live your life despairing over that fact. That’s a beautiful thing to read in a 4,000-year-old text.

Yet the Middle Kingdom didn’t last, either. Around 1700 BC, after about 300 years of stability and centralized power, things began to unravel once again. The kings moved their capital back to Thebes in the south, essentially admitting that they had lost control over the Delta and Lower Egypt. This time, however, their rivals had come from outside Egypt: The Hyksos, as they’re generally known, had come from the east during the peak of the Middle Kingdom. We can see their increasing archaeological imprint in Lower Egypt in the form of religious and burial practices identical to those found in the Levant at the same time. As central control waned, these people of foreign extraction became the most important political figures in the north, eventually founding the Fifteenth Dynasty and ruling Lower Egypt from their new capital at Avaris. They were the first, but not the last, kings of foreign extraction to rule Egypt, and their rise marked the end of the Middle Kingdom and the beginning of the Second Intermediate Period. Whatever Egyptian writers had to say about the Hyksos, however, they mostly ruled in the same fashion as any other dynasty. There was no major cultural or political break associated with their two centuries in power, which came to an end around 1550 BC.

A new age was dawning, and once again, the impetus came from the south. The rulers of Thebes had never given up on their claims to power over the whole country, fighting constantly against the Hyksos: We’ll talk about one of these warrior kings in next week’s episode, a fellow named Seqenenre Tao, who died in battle and whose mummy tells us exactly what happened to him at the end. Seqenenre Tao’s two successors would go on to succeed where he had failed, founding the third of ancient Egypt’s three golden ages.

This was the New Kingdom, and aside from the pyramids, most of what you and I and the general public probably associate with ancient Egypt comes from this period. This was the era when pharaohs led armies north and east into Asia, establishing an extended empire that stretched through Syria and the Levant, as well as south into present-day Sudan. New Kingdom pharaohs built the tombs in the Valley of the Kings, filling them with riches like those made famous by the discovery of Tutankhamun’s burial site. The famous temple complexes at Luxor and Abu Simbel were the fruits of the New Kingdom’s prosperity. As a participant in the rich international world of the Late Bronze Age, Egyptian goods crisscrossed the sea lanes of the Mediterranean and wound up in the palaces of Babylonian, Hittite, Assyrian, and Mycenaean Greek rulers. Egypt was never more powerful as a state among states than during the New Kingdom, when rulers like Thutmose, Seti, and the various Ramesses made their kingdom one of the linchpins of the world’s first true international order. We’ll spend two episodes exploring the ordinary folk of the New Kingdom in the coming weeks, one on the workers who built the Valley of the Kings and the other on their downtrodden contemporaries who constructed a new capital city at Amarna for Tutankhamun’s father, Akhenaten, a religious zealot.

When this glittering world of palaces and kings crumbled across the rest of the eastern Mediterranean amid the events of the Bronze Age Collapse, New Kingdom Egypt held on, even as the Hittites and Mycenaeans disappeared. Another Intermediate Period followed - the third, for those keeping score at home - but even then, Egypt retained its basic cultural and political orientation. The foundations laid in the days of Narmer and the earliest pharaohs were still there, holding up the ancient boundaries of the state and its society despite the passing of thousands of years.

Egypt would rise and fall, again and again, many times before its eventual incorporation into the Roman Empire. Whether its kings were Theban or foreign, whether it was under the rule of a centralized state or not, Egypt survived, a testament to the power of its animating ideas and the work of generations to weave those ideas inextricably into the tapestry of Egyptian society. They were there when Alexander the Great arrived on the banks of the Nile, and they were there when Caesar, Mark Antony, and Octavian made their own journeys to the land of the pharaohs. They’re still with us today, animating our most basic concepts of what a civilization and a state are supposed to be.

Next time on Past Lives, we’ll meet a real person who lived in ancient Egypt. Unusually for us here, this individual was a king - Seqenenre Tao - but his demise was anything but kingly.

Thanks so much for joining me, and I look forward to chatting with you again. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to our Patreon. It’s only 7 bucks a month, and you get access to tons of bonus content, like interviews with great scholars, Q&As with me, our book club, and much more. You can follow me on Instagram or on Bluesky.

Past Lives is a 100-percent independent production, and your support is what allows us to make this show. So, thank you.

Past Lives is written and narrated by me, Patrick Wyman. The producer is Morgan Jaffe. The music and sound design is by Gabriel Gould. The story editor is Rachel Kambury.

Subscribe to Past Lives and don’t forget to sign up for the Past Lives Patreon!

The young man never saw the knife that killed him. The long, thin blade slid under his shoulder blade, broke his rib, and punched into the lung beneath. Despite the overwhelming pain, he didn’t scream; he couldn’t, as all of the air in his body was forced out of him in one sudden exhalation. Shock drove his eyes wide. He gasped, or tried to. His jaw hung open, struggling to suck in air. A thin, rattling noise escaped his lips. Trying to find the source of the injury, he reached behind him, but his strength fled before his hand could reach the wound. He fell and never rose again. Whatever hopes and dreams he might have had died with him.

Subscribe to Past Lives on your platform of choice, or listen here:

For his people, however, the young man’s journey was just beginning. For his burial they dug a pit in the hot sand on the outskirts of their town, where the black land of the valley gave way to the red of the harsh deserts. Wrapping him in mats of woven reeds, they placed him on his side with his legs pulled up to his chest. His right shoulder, decorated with tattoos of an aurochs and a Barbary sheep, faced the sky. A few clay pots filled with grain and the paint he’d used to adorn his body in life went into the pit with his remains.

There were other graves nearby, many of them, a small city of the dead that existed parallel to the settlement of the living near the Nile and its bounty. The living used the same clay pots that served the dead, the same fine combs to brush their hair, the same instruments for mixing and applying body paint, the same jewelry of exotic shell, ivory, and polished stone.

He was well provided for. The living owed that much to the dead.

Break

Hello, my friends. Welcome to another episode of Past Lives. I’m Patrick Wyman.

More than 5,000 years ago, a young man died along the Nile River. His people buried him in the dry sand, and there he stayed until 1896, when a local resident discovered him and five other sets of remains. That resident went on to bring the famous British archaeologist and looter of antiquities extraordinaire Wallis Budge to the site. Budge immediately recognized that these were extremely old mummies, the oldest he’d ever seen, and set about excavating the burial pits. As was so often the case in these early excavations, Budge simply discarded what he found uninteresting, like the buried pots and the remains of the furs and mats in which the bodies had been wrapped. The British Museum, where Budge was the Keeper of the Oriental Department, acquired the mummies several years later. The young man’s remains were put on display in 1901, the earliest mummy the public could view in the museum’s extensive collections. If you go to the British Museum today, you can still see this extraordinarily ancient person - numbered EA32751 - in the same gallery where he’s been for more than a century. The early curators called him “Ginger,” because of the tufts of reddish hair still protruding from his scalp; today, he’s known as Gebelein Man.

Compared to our friend Otzi, who lived around the same time in northern Italy, we know far less about the physical aspects of Gebelein Man’s life. From his mummy we can glean some hints about the manner of his death and a few other things about him, but what really makes Gebelein Man so special is that he comes from a time and place we know in extraordinary detail: the Nile Valley, in what’s known as the Predynastic Period, the age just before the first kings rose to unite all of Egypt from the Cataracts of the Nile to the Delta. Radiocarbon dating of Gebelein Man’s mummy indicates that he lived between 3341 and 3017 BC, the later years of the long centuries leading up to Egypt’s unification. This means Gebelein Man was a witness to the processes of state formation and cultural transformation that would eventually, over the course of millennia, turn Egypt into the civilization we know today. For Gebelein Man, all of that lay in the unknowable future, but from our vantage point, we can see the swirling forces of change that defined his era and, in all likelihood, his life.

In today’s episode, rather than focusing exclusively on what we can learn from human remains, we’re going to try to reconstruct the world in which Gebelein Man lived in as much detail as possible. This wasn’t the ancient Egypt that produced the pyramids, much less the stunning tombs of the Valley of the Kings or an empire that reached as far as the Levant; in Gebelein Man’s time, Egypt was a fractured land of petty kings warring and competing with one another for preeminence, when hieroglyphic writing was a brand-new invention, and the first experiments with intentional mummification of human remains were underway. This was the Predynastic Period, which lasted for the better part of a thousand years. Gebelein Man lived in the latter half of that period. To understand his world, we need to excise our sense of the inevitable future and focus on the uncertainty of a time when nobody knew the kings would one day prevail, let alone that “Egypt” would one day exist as a unified entity.

Let’s start with Gebelein Man himself, and what we can learn from his mummified remains. The reams of cutting-edge scientific tests that have told us so much about the lives of people like the Ancient One and Ötzi simply haven’t been performed on Gebelein Man: no detailed study of the pathologies on his bones, no isotope analysis, no DNA testing, no analysis of the contents of his digestive tract or the pollen that hitched a ride with the food he ate. The contents of hi s grave were lost in the course of excavation, either discarded by Wallis Budge or taken and sold by the locals who found them after the fact. In the case of Gebelein Man, we can only really talk about the basics: The mummy belongs to a man aged between 18 and 21, which we can tell because the growth plates in his bones were recently fused. He stood 5’4” tall, was robustly built, and generally looks to have been a healthy lad. When researchers placed his remains in a CT scanner in 2012, they found something remarkable: a puncture wound under his left shoulder blade, a stabbing blow delivered with so much force that it nicked that bone, shattered the rib behind it, and penetrated his lung. The dimensions of the entry wound are probably too large to belong to a projectile point, but not large enough for a spear; the most likely candidate for the responsible weapon is a long, thin dagger made of flint or more likely copper. The CT scan identified no signs of defensive injuries, like the gash on Ötzi’s palm or the bruises on his wrists. The location of the wound strongly suggests that someone took him by surprise: Gebelein Man never saw the blow that killed him coming.

There was plenty of warfare happening in the Nile Valley around this time, and archaeologists have found cemeteries with burials that clearly belonged to soldiers who had fallen in combat, including one with a number of decapitated bodies whose heads were taken as trophies. Gebelein Man wasn’t buried in one of these cemeteries, but in the same location as a number of other contemporary individuals, none of whom have shown any sign of violent death. Whoever killed this young man, and whatever their reason, we can tentatively suggest that the end of his life perhaps didn’t take place in the context of a pitched battle. Murder seems more likely.

There is one more fascinating thing that recent analysis has revealed about Gebelein Man. Visitors to the British Museum have long noted the dark smudges on his upper right arm, but it wasn’t until a team led by the archaeologist Renee Friedman examined his remains using infrared imaging that they were able to identify what those smudges were: the world’s oldest figural tattoos, a pair of horned animals facing toward the front of his body. The upper of the two animals is probably a wild bovine known as an aurochs; the lower is a Barbary sheep. Both were extraordinarily common in Predynastic art, with bovines remaining a symbol of male power and virility - particularly of the royal variety - well into the ages of Egyptian history we’re more familiar with.

Those basic facts and their narrow interpretation amounts to just about everything we know and can say about Gebelein Man’s physical remains. But we’ve hardly maxed out on possible ways to interpret his life. The Nile Valley in which Gebelein Man was buried is one of the best-understood archaeological landscapes in the world. We’re most familiar with the later millennia of occupation under the pharaohs of a united Egypt, but since the 19th century, archaeologists have carried out hundreds of excavations and performed a hundred years of continuous analysis. All of that means that we have a far better grasp of Gebelein Man’s home region and the time in which he lived than we do Ötzi or the Ancient One. Gebelein Man may be a less distinct figure than his fellow ancients, but we can view the world around him in much greater focus.

Broadly speaking, Egypt can be divided into two major regions: the Delta in the north, where the Nile splits into dozens of intertwining, braided channels before it meets the Mediterranean; and the Nile Valley further south, a long, thin strip of incredibly fertile land that was constantly replenished by the river’s floods until the introduction of massive dams in the 20th century. Most research on ancient Egypt has focused on sites in the Nile Valley rather than the Delta because they’re easier to find: The constantly shifting landscape of intersecting channels and surrounding marshes tends to erase signs of past activity. The Delta also had fewer of the conspicuous monumental structures that attracted early archaeologists to the region; that’s changing now as more sites dating to the distant Predynastic are excavated to modern standards, but the fact remains that we have far less information about the Delta than we do about the Nile Valley to the south.

Luckily for us, Gebelein Man lived in the Nile Valley, and in a particular slice of it that we happen to know extremely well. Gebelein is more than 300 miles south of Cairo, located along a bend in the river that looks like a backwards C. This relatively small area, with a desert route linking the two ends of the bend, is widely considered the heartland of ancient Egyptian political life, society, and culture. Thebes, the longtime capital of the pharaohs, was located here, along with a great many of the monuments that come to mind when we think of ancient Egypt. So too was the Valley of the Kings, where the pharaohs of the New Kingdom buried their rulers, including Tutankhamun and his infamous treasure hoard.

More than 2,000 years before that, however, the region around that bend in the Nile wasn’t the center of a sprawling state; it was a battleground between at least three warring petty kingdoms, each of which was centered on a substantial settlement. Hierakanpolis, or Nekhen, was one; the second, Naqada, gives its name to the archaeological cultures found in the region during the Predynastic; and the third, Abydos, eventually produced the rulers who would unite Egypt and served as the location of their earliest magnificent burials. In this region, we can see the entire sequence of cultural and political development that transformed the fractured Nile Valley into the homeland of powerful rulers, its people from wandering pastoralists and subsistence farmers into subjects of the pharaoh. In the second half of the fourth millennium BC, we can see the roots of nearly every aspect of ancient Egyptian society that would eventually come to define it, from reverence for the dead to hieroglyphic writing to massive royal tombs. Superficially, much of what appears in the archaeological record from this time looks familiar to us, but this familiarity carries a major risk: When we read this age in light of the future we know, we risk treating it as a prelude, where the only historical threads that matter are the ones we can easily spot and carry through into later ages.

For all the fascinating things we can learn from this approach, I think it’s a misleading way to actually make sense of the past. Not all of the threads woven during the Predynastic carried through to the Egypt of the pharaohs, and the continuities we do see don’t necessarily reflect what actually mattered most to the people living in that earlier time. Just because we can see kings or wannabe kings in the archaeological record doesn’t mean they were as powerful or important to Predynastic society as they would later become. Moreover, there’s no reason to think that those kings were on an orderly road to the ultimate power they would later come to wield: State formation, the process that defined the world in which Gebelein Man lived and died, was messy, violent, and unpredictable. Perhaps the tensions that went along with that process were the cause of his death.

Break

“State formation” sounds like a daunting idea, but it’s actually pretty straightforward: It’s the process that created states, with kings or other leaders at the top, underlings to do their bidding, and claims over people and territory. Ancient Egypt is generally considered to be one of the purest examples of state formation: We can see, both in the archaeological record and in scattered textual references to the Predynastic period in which Gebelein Man lived, how chieftains became kings ruling over a unified state. Because the ancient Egyptian state lasted for so long, and was so consistent in its basic ideological orientation and ways of doing business, it stands as the case to which all others are compared. This is often an implicit comparison rather than a conscious choice: Our idea of how states come into existence is so shaped by the Egyptian example that it seems like a checklist of traits, a roadmap to follow, rather than one possibility among many. Millennia of intensive agriculture in a rich, fruitful landscape - the thick, black soil of the Nile Valley - led to surplus production, which created an elite, who then competed with one another over the spoils until one of them emerged victorious and unified the country. Et voilà: state formation.

More recent research, however, has found cases of state formation all around the world over many thousands of years: in Neolithic China, not once but several times; in Bronze Age Europe north of the Alps, centuries before the Greeks and Romans invented “civilization”; in the tropical forests of Mesoamerica on multiple occasions between 1000 BC and 1000 AD; and a hundred other times and places. Few of them look much like Predynastic Egypt. What’s even more fascinating is that even the Egyptian case doesn’t look much like scholars used to think, now that we’ve had a long time to examine the concept and its execution.

That old idea of ancient Egyptian state formation was rooted in a 19th-century European conception of what a state was supposed to look like: Ancient states must have been the products of orderly, rational processes of construction, to that way of thinking, just like the sleek, powerful new nation-states of 19th-century Europe. But - and this seems obvious to say now in 2026 - ancient Egypt wasn’t a 19th-century nation-state. It never was. These early systematic excavators of ancient Egypt were reading back into the distant past their own ideas of what a state was and how it came into being, filling in the gaps of the evidence like the scientists in Jurassic Park using frog DNA to make dinosaurs. Official titles and seals had to speak to a single ruler with an efficient bureaucracy, the purpose of writing had to be administration, and so on. As it turns out, state formation in the 19th century was a lot less orderly than these scholars believed, but it was their belief in that orderly model that influenced their portrayal of ancient Egypt’s creation as a state, not the reality.

In this old way of thinking, every political development during Gebelein Man’s time - the Predynastic - had to lead up to a sharp break that created a new order with a single, all-powerful king ruling the entire country. This meant that for years, scholars hunted for the aspects of Predynastic life that proved this break occurred with the accession of Narmer, the first pharaoh. Those aspects had to conform to the model of civilization they believed to be true, one that emphasized agriculture, the generation of surplus, hierarchical leadership, cities, and writing for administration. Everything else was at best a dead end and unimportant to the future, or at worst completely unworthy even of notice, like the humble goods in clay pots that had been placed in Gebelein Man’s grave. How much richer would our understanding of this person be if Wallis Budge had bothered to pay attention to those pots, and what was in them? While we recognize how much was lost in the age of careless excavation, it’s easy to forget that our knowledge is still being shaped by the ideas that animated those careless excavators and their analysis of what they found.

When we go back and reexamine Gebelein Man’s world on its own terms, rather than those imposed by modern scholarship, it flares into brilliant light. Looking at the Predynastic from the perspective of its past, rather than its future, makes it both more alien and less. The key insight once again sounds basic, but it’s essential: Nobody knew the warring chiefdoms of the Upper Nile Valley were on their way to becoming ancient Egypt, that there would be any sort of unified state ruling over this entire region, or that the next 3,000 years would see remarkable cultural and political stability. We think of Egypt as a quintessentially agricultural society dependent on the Nile’s annual flooding to replenish its fields with moisture and rich silt, but during Gebelein Man’s life, agriculture was relatively new to the region; unlike Mesopotamia, where the earliest cities grew out of agricultural villages and landscapes that were already millennia old, the people of the Nile Valley were latecomers to farming. When we look at sites of an equivalent age in Mesopotamia, we see layer after layer after layer of occupation, a slow and steady movement to towns and cities. In Upper Egypt, the introduction of agriculture came like a bolt of lightning out of the sky.

Archaeologists have spent decades looking for the earliest farming villages along the Upper Nile, which would date to between 5000 and 4000 BC, and they haven’t found many. That’s in part because the Nile’s flooding constantly dumped new layers of soil on top of old settlements, which means that any evidence would be buried under ten or twenty feet of sediment; even so, that lack is striking. It’s possible we just haven’t found them, but these early farming villages do exist further to the north in Egypt, near the Faiyum Oasis and in the Delta; maybe we haven’t found them in Upper Egypt because they either weren’t common or didn’t exist at all. What we do see in the archaeological record of this earlier age, what we call the Badarian Culture - from about 5000-3800 BC - is evidence of mobile pastoralism: people moving around from campsite to campsite with their herds of cattle and sheep. All that remains of these people are thin scatterings of stone artifacts and animal bones and what are believed to be post-holes left behind by temporary structures. These people simply didn’t stay in a single place for long, and whatever farming they engaged in was opportunistic and secondary to stockraising. It was probably what we call “flood-retreat agriculture,” where the seeds are planted immediately after the flood and simply left to grow until harvest time. It’s less efficient than tending crops year-round, but offers more flexibility to people who still want to be mobile. That seems to have been the case in the Upper Nile Valley until quite late, around 3800 BC, just a few centuries before Gebelein Man’s life and death.

There was one exception to their general mobility, though. In life, they wandered, not just through the Nile Valley but into the deserts beyond; in death, they settled down in vast necropolises. To paraphrase the memorable words of the archaeologist David Wengrow, in Egypt, cities of the dead came long before cities of the living. This makes a certain kind of sense: Mobile pastoralists might not have permanent settlements, but they still require land to graze their cattle, perhaps fields for their flood-retreat agriculture, and access to particular routes through the landscape. Their necropolises were claims to territory, to the rights to graze, grow, move, and bury their dead. When other groups wandered into that territory, they would see the surface markers and know that the land belonged to someone else, that their dead made eternal claims to it. These pre-Egyptians of the Badarian Culture spent an enormous amount of time and effort on the dead, filling their graves with everything they had needed in life: combs, cosmetic palettes, and jewelry were all common, and while some people were buried with more than others, practically everyone had something.

But why then, in the fifth millennium BC, did these cemeteries come into being? The answer probably lies not in the Nile Valley itself, but in what was happening in the surrounding deserts. The era of the Green Sahara, when vastly increased rainfall had transformed the sand and bare rock of the desert into welcoming savannahs spliced by rivers, was coming to an end. The herders who had for centuries wandered through those savannahs with their cattle could no longer survive as the water dried up and the sands encroached. The Nile Valley became increasingly crowded with people. Perhaps mobile pastoralism was no longer as viable; it required more land than dedicated agriculture, after all, and with rising populations, there wasn’t enough yield to go around. It was these pressures that created the world Gebelein Man knew in the few centuries before his birth, transforming a pastoral society into an agricultural one, with petty kings waging ceaseless wars for supremacy in the Nile Valley.

The recency of this transition from pastoralism to farming and mobility to sedentism left deep marks on the culture Gebelein Man encountered in life. Compared to Mesopotamia around this same time, when the city of Uruk was already blossoming into an urban center with tens of thousands of residents and gigantic monumental buildings, the Upper Nile Valley was rather bland and crude; the first experiments in large-scale construction were just getting underway. Unlike Mesopotamia, however, it was mostly the dead who received the honor of occupying those new monumental structures, not the living. That intense emphasis on the centrality of death stuck around long after cemeteries were no longer the only way to lay claim to territory, with generations of practice winding its way into the cultural DNA Egypt would eventually carry into the age of the pharaohs.

The chieftains competing to be kings in the centuries of the Naqada Culture in the Upper Nile Valley, the age lasting from about 3800 to 3100 BC that included Gebelein Man’s life, did build some stunning structures, like the palace with imported cedar posts holding up a massive ornamental facade more than 40 feet wide that one powerful man constructed at Hierakonpolis around 3600 BC. Their largest investments, however, were in their eternal resting-places. Around that same time, one of the earliest identifiable rulers in Hierakonpolis erected a tomb measuring some 200 by 130 feet and filled it with his riches, most of which were later plundered, but enough beautiful, high-status pottery survived to tell us its occupant was a singular figure. Even more intriguing, a ring of animal burials surrounded the main tomb: Some were domesticated, but others clearly weren’t, like baboons, a hippo, and even an elephant, all of which had been kept alive for some time prior to their deaths. This would-be king had an exotic menagerie and enormous ambitions centuries before Narmer ruled over a united Egypt.

On the one hand, this looks like state formation, right? But on the other hand, the fact that centuries separate this man from the first kings of a united Egypt tells us that there were no straight lines from wandering pastoralists to a unified state. Instead, we see short bursts of intense competition and then decades of relative stability. Gebelein Man, to his misfortune, seems to have lived during one of those competitive bursts. He had no way of knowing, nor did anyone living in Upper Egypt at the time, that this last burst would lead directly to the rulers of Abydos uniting the Delta and the Valley. How could they? Such a thing had never existed before, nor was there any sense of inevitability pushing them toward that future. Their pastoralist heritage was still centuries closer to them in time than the Great Pyramid.

We can see that pastoralist heritage in Gebelein Man’s tattoos, of all places. One of the defining features of the old Badarian Culture was its emphasis on bodily decoration: paints, necklaces, earrings, anklets, bracelets, lip- and nose-studs. Graves contained extraordinary decorated combs and cosmetic palettes. This makes a certain kind of sense: When you have to carry around your possessions as you travel through the landscape, your body becomes a declaration of identity and status to the world. Even as Badarian pastoralists settled in the Upper Nile Valley and slowly transformed into the sedentary subjects of warring petty kings in the Naqada period, the body remained central, both in life and in death. Those two tattoos on Gebelein Man’s shoulder have survived, legible only under infrared light, when the body paints that adorned him washed away and the jewelry tha t decorated his body decayed or simply wasn’t thought important enough by Wallis Budge and his ilk to save. In those faded marks, the recency of the transitions that created Gebelein Man’s world are still visible.

Gebelein Man lived in a time of widespread and convulsive transformations. We’ll never know if the blade that killed him was wielded during a confrontation in some way related to the rise of those warring chieftains at Abydos, Hierakonpolis, and Naqada: A young, robust man dying violently in a time of conflict raises suspicions, but the evidence is gone forever. He certainly wasn’t the only young man of his time to die for the ambitions of the powerful. What we can say with certainty is that despite his life being shaped by these forces, Gebelein Man wasn’t aware of where they would one day lead. He would never see a king of a united Egypt, or even the concept of Egypt, for that matter. He had no idea that the ruler of Abydos in his day would have descendants who would wield maces and crush their insignificant enemies in reality and the images they disseminated to their subjects. Despite the royal tombs that were being built on a larger scale than ever before around him, despite the invention of the earliest hieroglyphic writing, his life owed just as much or more to the pastoralist past of his people. He was interred in a city of the dead, his body displaying to all around him who he was and why he mattered, probably with the goods necessary for his journey into death. Those aspects of Egyptian society, present long before his birth and remaining long after his death, were more vital and enduring than any king.

Next time on Past Lives, we’ll move a long way to the east, where we’ll meet another mummy. She was buried around 1800 BC in the hyper-arid Tarim Basin of Xinjiang — we know her as the Princess of Xiaohe.

Thanks so much for joining me, and I look forward to chatting with you again. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to our Patreon. It’s only 7 bucks a month, and you get access to tons of bonus content, like interviews with great scholars, Q&As with me, our book club, and much more. You can follow me on Instagram or on Bluesky.

Past Lives is a 100-percent independent production, and your support is what allows us to make this show. So, thank you.

Past Lives is written and narrated by me, Patrick Wyman. The producer is Morgan Jaffe. The music and sound design is by Gabriel Gould. The story editor is Rachel Kambury.

Subscribe to Past Lives and don’t forget to sign up for the Past Lives Patreon!

This has been a long road. It took more than five years to research and write Lost Worlds. As things turned out, covering 10,000 years from the end of the Ice Age to the Bronze Age Collapse was a rather more ambitious project than I had initially anticipated. Writing a book that managed to both tell a coherent story and make an argument about the broad shape of our shared human past without losing the complexity of diverse societies around the globe was a challenge, the most serious I’ve ever undertaken. I can only hope that I’ve done the material justice.

The basic thrust of Lost Worlds is this. We have an old story about how a world recognizable to us came into being. It begins with a prelapsarian state of innocence, in which humans lived as wandering foragers for uncounted millennia, trudging across the frozen tundra of a planet caught in the grips of the last Ice Age. It ends with “civilization,” the amorphous grab-bag of characteristics that generally includes cities, states with kings at the top, laws, and writing.

How we got from that state of innocence to civilization is usually presented as an orderly, logical process: People settled down and started farming, which created surplus production of food, which created specialized jobs and leaders to decide where the surplus since some people no longer had to toil all day, every day. Fast-forward a few thousand years, and you get cities, defined hierarchies, mechanisms of political and social control, and a world that is recognizably on its way to becoming our own. We can see how we went from the late Bronze Age to the present; seeing how we got here from the Ice Age is rather harder.

Hunter-gatherers never existed in a state of innocence and harmony with the natural world, but there were far fewer people, living simpler lives, 13,000 years ago than there were 3,000 years ago. Something very definitely changed in that period, not just in one place but all around the globe. But the orderly story no longer holds. We’ve learned too much about the distant past, thanks largely to extraordinary new archaeological methods that give us access to aspects of the ancient world we could only imagine, for us to see any sort of clear, neat global march of progress.

Lost Worlds offers a new story that explores just how different our conception of the distant past is today than it was even a couple of decades ago. It’s a story of ups and downs, trials and failures, the creation of stunning monuments that still stand today and the end of centuries-old ways of life. The major driver in this story is not inevitability, but contingency: how people made choices that made sense to them in the context of their own world.

This story is messy, far messier than the logical, ordered path that led us from wandering to civilization, but human beings are messy creatures. That’s true today, it was true in the Middle Ages, and it was true for all of the 10,000 years Lost Worlds encompasses. The benefit is a much more human portrait of our shared past. We can learn a great deal from these people - their struggles and successes both - who were like us in far more ways than they weren’t.

Order Lost Worlds from your retailer of choice today. I really hope you enjoy it!

If you enjoy this, you can preorder the book through your retailer of choice, or get the audiobook here or through another platform. Nothing is more helpful to an author than preorders, and I would be honored if you would buy the book!

The Arctic winds blowing in buffeted the hunters in their mammoth- and camel-hide clothing. Spring was coming to the valley, but the dying days of winter still carried the freezing burn of the great ice sheets which lay a few weeks’ walk to the north.

The hunters and their people had come from the north not long ago; the eldest among them were the grandchildren of those original migrants, sages who told generational stories of enormous glaciers stretching as far as the eye could see. They themselves had seen the vast lakes where meltwater collected behind dams of ice, and they told of the apocalyptic floods that scoured the land when those dams collapsed.

This was a hard place, but it was home, a vast territory that promised new possibilities around every spiky, snowy ridge and at each new river juncture. Countless, well-trod pathways through the grass betrayed the recent passage of migrating herds: camels, horses, bison, and even the occasional mastodon or mammoth. The hunters tracked them for miles, leaving behind tiny signs of their presence in an enormous and nearly empty landscape.

Subscribe to Past Lives on your platform of choice, or listen here:

On this particular journey, the hunters left just such a sign behind them under a sandstone ledge. On the surface, it was a tiny mound of dirt, but beneath the mound lay the remains of an infant. The baby boy, born toward the end of the previous spring, had not lived to see the wildflower meadows erupt in their riotous colors. With him the hunters had left a few of their stone tools, the treasured, razor-sharp points that speared their prey, the scrapers they used to clean hides, the blades they used to cut their meat. Maybe he would need them, wherever he went next.

Perhaps the band of hunters would pass this way again. If the herds traveled this direction, they would follow, but if their path took them elsewhere, so be it. They were wanderers, strangers in unfamiliar territory. Within a few centuries, their many descendants had journeyed thousands of miles from this place: south into Mexico, east across the Great Plains, and perhaps even back up north. The secrets of all those future journeys lay in the bones of that tiny infant, who died before he could take his first steps.

I’m Patrick Wyman. Welcome to Past Lives.

Around 13,000 years ago, a band of wandering hunters stopped at an overhanging rock ledge in what is now Montana. They probably didn’t stay for long, at most a few days, but they left behind something extraordinarily precious and heartbreaking: the remains of a year-old baby, felled by the harsh conditions of life on the northern Great Plains during the last gasp of the Ice Age.

Millennia later, in 1968, two men were digging away at a hillside with a backhoe and a dump truck, collecting fill dirt to take down to the local high school for the construction of a septic tank drain field. As they churned through the soil with the machine, the two caught sight of bone and stone artifacts sticking up out of the ground, and immediately stopped digging. They got more delicate tools, and dug down further. Before long, they ran across fragments of crushed human bone: the infant’s remains, still in place after 13,000 years. Archaeologists quickly got to work on what the diggers had unearthed, naming the location the “Anzick Clovis Site,” after the owners of the land - the Anzicks - and the archaeological group to which the stone tools placed with the baby belonged, the Clovis Culture. The infant they called “Anzick-1.” He will be the subject of today’s episode, the first person we meet in our brand-new season, Bodily Experiences.

The Clovis people, as we call them, were among the first to arrive in the Americas as the glaciers receded and the Ice Age finally came to an end. Anzick-1’s remains are the only human skeleton ever discovered in association with Clovis artifacts. The artifacts found in Anzick-1’s tiny grave are numerous and among the finest examples of Clovis technology ever discovered: mammoth-ivory rods, razor-sharp stone flakes, and most of all, the beautiful double-sided projectiles - Clovis points - that define this archaeological culture. Even then, the most stunning evidence the Anzick site had to offer wasn’t stone or ivory; it was the wealth of thousands of years of genetic information, kept safe inside the infant’s bones beneath the earth.

It would take another half-century after the site’s discovery for its true importance to become clear. Testing Anzick-1’s remains for DNA revealed that the group to which he belonged, the Clovis people, was ancestral to practically all later indigenous Americans. Anzick-1’s life was extraordinarily brief, but in death, his bones unlocked the secrets of how humans populated the Americas.

Today, the Anzick site lies just south of the tiny town of Wilsall, Montana, situated among the rolling grasslands and hills nestled between sub-ranges of the Rocky Mountains. The Shields River, a tributary of the Yellowstone, burbles through the bottomland just below a rocky sandstone outcrop. Thirteen thousand years ago, that sandstone formed the ledge of an overhanging rock shelter, a welcome respite for the nomadic hunters who passed by. The Crazy Mountains lie just to the east, easily visible on a clear summer day; they would have been even more prominent when the infant and his Clovis relatives came to this place, covered at the time by a thick layer of ice extending well down the slopes.

The world was a colder and harsher place then. The Ice Age - technically the “Last Glacial Period” - that had dominated the last 100,000 years of the planet’s history was nearing its end, but the hunters had no way of knowing that; the world had warmed and cooled in regular but unpredictable cycles several times over those thousand centuries. They were living in the midst of the last cold snap of the Ice Age, a period we call the Younger Dryas. While the Earth had steadily warmed over the past 5,000 or so years following the Last Glacial Maximum,when the ice sheets reached their greatest extent, the Younger Dryas reversed that progress; new forests reverted to hardy tundra, and glaciers expanded once more.

The whole planet looked wildly different then. It was substantially colder: With the onset of the Younger Dryas, temperatures dropped about 5 degrees Fahrenheit in At the peak of the Last Glacial Maximum, sea levels had been 440 feet below where they stand today, and they were still hundreds of feet below their present levels despite thousands of years of steady warming between then and the Younger Dryas. The continental shapes we know so well now were unrecognizable: The broad expanses of continental shelf that extend out into the ocean from present-day coastlines were dry land. Much of the North Sea between Britain and the European continent was a landmass called Doggerland; the islands of Southeast Asia, like Java and Borneo, were an extended region known as Sundaland; and in the far north, Beringia, a distinctive region in its own right, linked Alaska and Siberia together. The center of Beringia was about 500 miles from the most distant coastline; the submerged portions of the landmass would have doubled the present-day size of Alaska, so it was hardly a “land bridge.”

The vegetation and animal life that covered the planet were different, too. The vast temperate forests of the northern hemisphere didn’t exist, nor did many of the jungles that now blanket the tropics. In their places were diverse, thriving grasslands: savannah in Amazonia and parts of Southeast Asia, and highly productive Mammoth Steppe across most of Eurasia and North America. Animals suited to these environments, namely large grazers and the predators that ate them, abounded: These were the Pleistocene megafauna, like woolly mammoth and woolly rhinoceros, giant ground sloths, short-faced bears, cave lions, and sabre-tooth tigers. Wild horses and camels roamed the Great Plains, and herds of reindeer ranged far south into France and southern Europe.

It was probably the migrations of these animals that pulled Anzick-1’s ancestors down through Beringia into North America. Evidence for people living in the Americas prior to that time, around 13,000 years ago, is sparse and controversial; it’s likely that there were humans living somewhere on those two continents before then, but our scattered archaeological and genetic indications don’t cohere into any sort of viable narrative about what those earlier occupants were doing or how they were related to later indigenous people in the Americas. There were, however, many groups of people living up north in Beringia. Their ancestors had probably migrated east from Siberia in the past 10,000 years or so, becoming isolated from other groups living in northeast Asia for long enough to develop a distinctive genetic signature. Since Beringia was such a big place, with huge distances separating Yukon and Siberia, those groups had hundreds or thousands of years to diverge from one another. This created what geneticists call “population structure” among the ancient Beringians. While these groups shared recent common ancestors, genetic drift within a limited set of mating partners made them distinctive enough that we can track their signatures in the DNA record through vast periods of time and across staggeringly huge geographic spaces.

Around 14,000 years ago, Anzick-1’s ancestors were probably living somewhere along the eastern edges of Beringia, in what is today central Alaska. For thousands of years, their overland path south had been blocked by the two enormous ice sheets that covered most of present-day Canada. The Cordilleran ice sheet, in the west, stretched from Washington state to Yukon; the much larger Laurentide ice sheet extended from the Canadian Rockies to Greenland to the Arctic. As the planet slowly warmed following the Last Glacial Maximum, these two ice sheets began to melt along their edges. Where the two ice sheets had once met and merged along the continental divide, the melting created an open, ice-free corridor, the viable land route to the south that had so long eluded the Beringians.

While it’s likely that some people went south along the coast via boat before and after this time, the opening of the ice-free corridor aligns neatly with the dates we have for the Clovis people. The archaeological site of Swan Point, located near what’s now Fairbanks, dates to between 14,000 and 14,500 years ago. It sits close to what would have been the northern opening of the ice-free corridor. Stone artifacts discovered at Swan Point bear a strong resemblance to the later toolkit of the Clovis people. It is as close to a smoking gun as the archaeological record is likely to provide: A group very much like the Clovis people lived near what was likely the northern entrance to the ice-free corridor, at precisely the time they would have needed to start moving south in order to meet the dates we see in North America a thousand years later.

Among those people who camped at Swan Point, cooking red deer over the fire and cracking the leftover bones for their marrow while others flaked their stone tools, were Anzick-1’s ancestors. As years, decades, and then centuries passed, plants and animals colonized the ice-free corridor from both directions. Anzick-1’s ancestors followed the animals as they had always done, tracking them south and eventually emerging into a brand-new world.

Anzick-1 lived his all-too-brief life within a pioneer society. If there were other people living south of the ice sheets or not, there weren’t very many of them, and the small founding groups of Clovis people entered a landscape that was effectively empty of humans. Its animal occupants were wildly different from what we see in North America today. Herds of woolly mammoth rumbled across the open grassl ands. Camels and horses wandered the Great Plains, pursued by dire wolves, lions, and saber-toothed cats. Short-faced bears, far larger than the biggest grizzly, hibernated in protected dens. Giant ground sloths and other megafauna were a common sight. Combined with the bitter cold and omnipresent ice, it sounds like a lethal and unwelcoming environment to us in the present; to Anzick-1’s hardy band, however, it was more like paradise.

People have been hunting animals since long before our ancestors could be classified as Homo sapiens. We as a species tend to follow predictable patterns in how we choose our prey, the same general patterns that most predators follow: We take the biggest game first, because bigger animals provide more meat and thus more return on the energy investment we make to hunt and kill the animal. An adult Columbian mammoth weighed roughly 22,000 pounds; a white-tailed deer weighs about 150 pounds. Given the choice, a hunter is going to take the mammoth over the deer every time. The land the Clovis people entered around 13,000 years ago was full of enormous ambulatory meat lockers with little-to-no experience of human predation. It wasn’t exactly like shooting fish in a barrel, but they didn’t have a lot of competition; the prey didn’t make it very hard for them, either. In those conditions, the Clovis people thrived. A small initial group, probably no more than a few hundred people, multiplied over and over again, spreading quickly through this new continent. Within just a few hundred years, by about 12,750 years ago, descendants of that group could be found across much of North America, from Montana to northern Mexico and the Pacific Northwest to the Atlantic shores of the southeast. The sheer speed of their expansion is remarkable, and in my opinion, perhaps the clearest example of demographic success we can see anywhere in prehistory.

Anzick-1 was born roughly halfway through this period of extraordinarily rapid expansion. The first Clovis artifacts date to about 150 years before his birth; the latest come from about 150 years after. Those artifacts are well known and understood, particularly the double-sided projectile points the Clovis people used to hunt big game. Clovis points, as these are known, are intricate three-to-four-inch-long blades with a groove - or a “flute” - running down the center. They’re extremely difficult to make, aesthetically beautiful but razor-sharp and dangerous. When affixed to the end of a hunter’s spear—which he would hurl in a move not unlike the plastic contraption we use to throw tennis balls for our dogs—the damage caused would be lethal even to the largest game. Modern experiments have shown that a Clovis point can penetrate between five and nine inches of flesh equivalent, easily enough to reach the organs of an ancient bison or mastodon. And there was always more than one being thrown: The Naco Mammoth, found in Arizona in 1951, had no fewer than eight Clovis points embedded in its flesh when it died. Armed with Clovis points, these hunters were perfectly equipped to stalk and kill the large grazers that were still common in the unexplored lands of North America.

When the people of his band placed little Anzick-1 in his grave, they also put a finished Clovis point in the ground with him, along with dozens of other stone and bone artifacts: double-sided blades used like knives to cut meat, sharp scrapers to clean hides, enigmatic beveled rods made from bone, and larger pieces of stone that would eventually have been knapped into smaller tools. The infant was buried with most of the technological necessities that would have allowed him to survive in the freezing cold of the northern Great Plains as an adult. Scientific investigations of those tools have revealed a great deal about how Anzick-1’s band would have lived, and what he saw around him during his all-too-brief life.

Our understanding of the lives of the Clovis people relies on inference and educated guesswork. Archaeologists have never found an unambiguous settlement, only the possible remains of seasonal or nightly campsites. Most of what we know about the Clovis people comes from widespread but limited finds of stone artifacts, particularly those distinctive points, and the kill sites where they dispatched mammoth, mastodon, and giant bison. We know they were hunter-gatherers, but that doesn’t narrow it down much. Foragers can live in many different ways: Some stay put in limited areas, extensively exploiting the animals, plants, fish, and other resources available nearby; others travel widely. Some rely almost exclusively on wild game, while others are dedicated to collecting berries and nuts, and still others collect shellfish and kelp as their preferred foods. Even among dedicated hunters, variation rules: Stalking deer or boar through a dense forest is a much different lifestyle than going out onto the ice-choked waters of the Arctic to hunt seal or whale or trapping small game in the Kalahari. The stone tools buried with Anzick-1 weren’t suitable for any of those purposes: They were the implements of dedicated big-game hunters, nomads who traversed extraordinarily long distances in search of their preferred prey.

When the archaeologist Samuel Stockton White V ran tests on the Anzick artifacts, he found in the surviving flint traces of their original uses from 13,000 years ago. The traces could be found in the form of microscopic proteins caught between the tiny, jagged crenellations on the edges of the tools that made them so useful to their makers. One blade had been used to cut through the flesh of a Pleistocene camel, a species that has only rarely been documented as prey for the Clovis people. Scraper tools were used to shape the elk bones that became long rods, perhaps the foreshafts of darts tipped with Clovis points. Other traces were lost to time, or the items had been made but not put to use before the burial. Between those protein traces, the tools’ shape, and parallels with other Clovis artifact assemblages, the basic conclusion is that Anzick-1 spent his short life on the move.

We have all the information we need to reconstruct a day in that life.

As babies generally do, Anzick-1 probably woke up with a cry for his mother. Infants in forager societies, particularly those that included hypermobile hunters like the Clovis people, tend to spend their time in close contact with their mothers, often carried in some sort of sling. It was surely a frigid morning, and would have seemed so even for those who live in that part of Montana today. The looming ice sheets had receded over the past millennia, but they were still close, and the freezing winds that blew down through the unprotected plains were viciously cold. The landscape was open, even more so than it is now; fewer trees crowded the hillsides and riverbanks. Snow never left the peaks of the mountains, not even at the height of what passed for summer, with seasons less defined than they are today. Anzick-1’s year of life was spent amid variations of cold that simply don’t exist anywhere on the planet anymore.

Assuming it was a day to move camp, which would have happened dozens of times every year, the baby first saw light as portable shelters of wood and hide were broken down and lashed into bundles that could be dragged across the grasslands with a travois or sled. We have no idea how large Clovis bands were, but several dozen members is likely based on parallels to other groups of big-game hunters: enough to form a durable community whose members could reproduce without inbreeding, but not so many that food intake became unsustainable.

We have no indications of food storage among the Clovis people, and most archaeologists assume they exploited plants only opportunistically, drawing most of their caloric intake from meat. Anzick-1 was obviously too small to consume mammoth or elk, but as his eyes adjusted to the brightness of a Montana morning, he smelled meat roasting over a small cookfire. He saw the adults of his band munching on greasy, fatty flesh or struggling to masticate preserved, rawhide-tough meat that was weeks or even months old. Even in a ta rget-rich environment like North America at this time, with perfectly tailored weaponry, taking big game was a chancy business: A single failed hunt could plunge the band into days or weeks of hunger. Better to live off stale scraps and ensure their longer-term chances of survival.

Once the camp was packed, it was time to move. To the limited extent that we can reconstruct their patterns of movement, the Clovis people followed the rivers that cut through North America’s interior. In this particular area, that was the Yellowstone River and its tributaries, which drain thousands of square miles of land in the northern Plains. The higher reaches of the region were even less hospitable than they are today, but elk grazed on the hillsides while herds of bison, mammoth, horses, and other animals followed the same migration routes the newly arrived people did. We know, thanks to that single protein analysis, that camel was on the menu at some point not too long before Anzick-1’s death.

This was the rhythm of Anzick-1’s short life. His mother strapped him into a sling or baby-board of some kind and went about the innumerable tasks that required her attention: drawing water from the nearby creek or river into a leather container; feeding the baby; packing up their sleeping furs and other belongings before beginning the journey; dressing in garments of elk-, mammoth-, and camel-hide; and seeing to any other children she might have had, who were probably at least five years old, based on usual patterns of birth spacing in mobile foraging societies. That’s because it was almost impossible for a woman to care for more than one child who couldn’t walk at a time. Their band was only viable if it kept moving.

Their most fundamental collective experience was walking: at least a few miles every day while encamped, perhaps ten miles per day when burdened with their possessions and moving between campsites, thirty miles or even more for hunters moving fast while tracking prey. Anzick-1 spent the majority of his brief life in that carrier with his mother, gently swaying as she took long strides through the omnipresent grass or stepped carefully onto slick river rocks, napping as she trudged along the banks of the Yellowstone and its tributaries, squawling when a nap was disturbed by the ruckus of the hunters returning to camp with hundreds of pounds of camel meat. By afternoon, they were stopping at a promising campsite, breaking out the shelters and sleeping furs, and preparing food. Work would get underway, hammerstones ringing on flint as broken stone tools were sharpened and retouched. As night descended and the baby fell asleep again, the band bedded down. Perhaps they would stay a few days, or not, depending. There was always a next day, a next journey, until, for Anzick-1, there wasn’t.

We don’t know whether Anzick-1’s illness was brief or long. The bones are poorly preserved and fragmentary, as the remains of infants so often are, but there’s no obvious indication of physical trauma. As with every society before the very recent past, infant and child mortality would have been astronomically high among the Clovis people: Roughly half of all babies born would not have reached adulthood, whether because of malnutrition, injury, or illness. That last option is the most likely in this case, as it has been throughout human history, so vulnerable are the very young to infection. In some cases, archaeologists have excavated sizable skeletal samples from a single time and place: With that much data, we can reconstruct actual demographic patterns that tell us about population health and the kinds of stresses they experienced. In the case of the Clovis people, however, we have almost no human remains to work with - except those of little Anzick-1. His are the only remains ever discovered in association with any of the hundreds of Clovis artifact finds, the sole human face of the first people we know well from the ancient Americas.

Because he is the only Clovis person ever discovered, the information hidden inside those tiny, fragmentary bones is beyond priceless. When analyzed, Anzick-1’s DNA revealed that his group was ancestral to practically all later indigenous people living in the Americas. It may not have been his band specifically, but their close relatives - cousins, uncles, people removed by only a few degrees - lay at the root of the family trees of people who would soon live everywhere from the Great Lakes to Tierra del Fuego. In genetic terms, the effective population size of this founding population of Clovis people numbered only in the low hundreds. The initial group that migrated south from Beringia was tiny, and everyone living in the Americas for the following 13,000 years was descended in whole or in part from them. Anzick-1 is our only indisputable proof of that connection, the link in the chain connecting millions upon millions of later people to some of their earliest identifiable ancestors.

But he was also a baby whose life ended far too soon. There is no reason to believe that people mourned the loss of the youngest among them any less than we do now simply because it happened so often; they weren’t inured to the pain, they just lived with more of it. That was a burden that every premodern person carried to a degree that is difficult, even impossible to imagine today. Yet we still know the pain of loss, and that is what a mother and a tight-knit community felt when they laid a baby to rest underneath a sandstone ledge 13,000 years ago. We can hope that they never again experienced that tragedy, though they surely did; more often, however, they felt the joy of children entering the world. Perhaps more than any other group in the archaeological record, the Clovis people succeeded in bringing more of those babies into the world and raising them to adulthood, soon to have children of their own. New bands split off and traveled far away from that spot near the Shields River, forgetting about the infant buried so long ago above the burbling waters. We remember him now, and thanks to him, the story of untold millions of later people deepens and expands in ways we never could have imagined.

Next time on Past Lives, we’ll head west a ways, to the banks of the Columbia River in Washington state. Around 8,500 years ago, a man was buried there, after he had already traveled hundreds of miles in his forty or fifty years of life. He’s known today as Kennewick Man, or the Ancient One, and he’s one of the best understood people we have from the distant past.

Thanks so much for joining me, and I look forward to chatting with you again. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to our Patreon. It’s only 7 bucks a month, and you get access to tons of bonus content, like interviews with great scholars, Q&As with me, our book club, and much more. You can follow me on Instagram or on Bluesky.

Past Lives is a 100-percent independent production, and your support is what allows us to make this show. So, thank you.

Past Lives is written and narrated by me, Patrick Wyman. The producer is Morgan Jaffe. The music and sound design is by Gabriel Gould. The story editor is Rachel Kambury.

Subscribe to Past Lives and don’t forget to sign up for the Past Lives Patreon!

The air was already a hot, humid haze by the time the sun began its ascent above the trees surrounding Mobile Bay. Daylight struggled to penetrate the density of the air; it certainly failed to cut through the thick pall of smoke lazily curling upward from the wreck.

Until very recently, the ship had been a large schooner, two-masted and nearly 90 feet long, far bigger than most of the scows hauling fish around the Gulf and the vessels making regular runs to Havana for sugar or to Mexico hauling crates of whiskey. Now, the massive schooner was almost completely burned away. The hull was barely visible, charred to the waterline.

Subscribe to Past Lives on your platform of choice, or listen here:

That had been the intention. The Clotilda was evidence of a rash of crimes, each one carrying serious punishments: evading customs, falsifying documents, smuggling, and, most egregiously, breaking the now 50-year-old ban on the importation of enslaved people. In theory, violating this particular law was punishable by death. In practice, not one person had ever suffered such a penalty.

Even so, the Clotilda’s owners weren’t taking any chances, which was why Captain William Foster had stacked seven cords of highly flammable wood in the hold and set it alight. The ship had been valuable - it was only five years old - but not as valuable as avoiding the attention of the authorities.

The ship that Foster was so keen to destroy had, until recently, held 103 Yoruba people captive. On top of their intermittent imprisonment in the hold during the weeks-long Atlantic crossing, the captives had been trapped in the Clotilda’s stifling underbelly for days to avoid detection by anti-slavery patrols inspecting suspicious vessels entering Mobile Bay. Throughout the ordeal, Zuma and Abache, Kanko and Shamba, Osia and Kossula, Yawith and Omolabi, Gumpa and Bougier, and nearly a hundred more had suffered, sang, sweltered, retched, cried, and survived. Seven people had not; the white sailors had thrown their bodies overboard for the sharks.

One captive, a two-year-old girl, not only survived her capture and the Middle Passage, but would live another 80 years after this particular July morning in 1860. When Matilda McCrear died in 1940, she was the last known survivor of the Transatlantic slave trade that had, over the course of nearly four hundred years, brought more than 12 million African people to the Americas.

---

Welcome to Past Lives. I’m Patrick Wyman.

Between the 16th century and the 1870s, more than 12 million people were trafficked from Africa to the New World. Nearly 2 million of those souls died on the Middle Passage, killed by disease, starvation, and the vicious punishments meted out by white slave ship crews. Rather than continue to suffer these agonies, many captives chose to take their own lives, refusing food or throwing themselves overboard, preferring the omnipresent sharks to whatever fate awaited them in the Americas. The Transatlantic slave trade was both one of the greatest crimes in human history and one of the foundational systems of our modern world. Simply put, there is no making sense of the 21st century without first contending with the fact and legacy of the Transatlantic slave trade and the Middle Passage.

While this colossal forced migration lasted for centuries, it didn’t last forever. The nascent abolitionist movement that grew out of the efforts of Olaudah Equiano and his contemporaries in the 1780s soon bore fruit: the British, the most prolific traffickers of the 18th century, abolished their slave trade in 1807, while the United States followed suit the following year. France and Spain banned the trade in 1818. Two years later, the US added teeth to its ban on the importation of captive Africans by declaring the practice to be an act of piracy and punishable as such. Brazil and Portugal, the last holdouts, legally prohibited the practice in the 1830s. To prove that these actions weren’t empty political gestures designed to assuage the consciences of those who had most profited from human trafficking, the Royal Navy dispatched warships to patrol the coast of West Africa, regularly intercepting vessels that were attempting to continue the slave trade illicitly.

As heartening and effective as these efforts were, they were nowhere near enough to stem the flow of enslaved people being illegally trafficked across the Atlantic, even to destinations that had formally outlawed the trade in human beings. The last captive Africans were transported to Cuba in the 1870s, more than 50 years after Spain was supposed to have abolished the practice, while the final shipment arrived in the United States on the eve of the Civil War. The last survivors of this horrific migration were still living in the early decades of the 20th century. When a blossoming generation of scholars and journalists sought out these elders—the last living witnesses to a centuries-long trauma—they were met with countless memories, and a keen understanding of the need to document them.

In today’s episode, we’ll focus on the last survivor of the last ship to smuggle captive Africans into the United States: the Clotilda, which arrived in Mobile Bay in July of 1860. Its passengers were the last known survivors of the Transatlantic slave trade. The last of them, Matilda McCrear, who was an infant when the Clotilda carried her from her home across the Middle Passage, died a free woman in Alabama in 1940. For those eighty years, the scorched hull of the ship that first imprisoned her lay just below sea level in Mobile Bay—a remnant of a past that cannot, and should not, stay buried or be forgotten.

Before we dive in, I want to talk a little bit about sources, because that’s an interesting story in and of itself. The survivors of the Clotilda first came to prominence in the 1920s thanks to the work of Zora Neale Hurston, whose novels and short stories about African American culture and experience made her one of the most celebrated and impactful figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston, a trained anthropologist, spent months interviewing a man known as Cudjoe Lewis, or Kossula, who had also arrived on the Clotilda: The resulting interviews became the masterpiece Barraccoon, a book that would not see publication until 2018. That same year, archaeologists discovered the wreck of the Clotilda precisely where it had been burned and left to rot away back in 1860. In the years since Barr accoon’s publication and the ship’s discovery, further work has dramatically expanded what we know about the vessel, its owners and operators, and its human cargo: The jointly authored volume Clotilda: The History and Archaeology of the Last Slave Ship sums up that work. For this episode, I’m also relying on the historian Hannah Durkin’s incredible book The Survivors of the Clotilda: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the American Slave Trade.

Matilda McCrear was the last known survivor of the Clotilda’s final journey, but that fact didn’t become apparent until 2020, when Hannah Durkin’s work brought her life to light. Before that, a woman named Redoshi, who was interviewed and filmed before her death in 1937, was thought to be the last. McCrear was the youngest passenger to endure the journey: She was only about two years old when the Clotilda left West Africa, and a little over 80 years old when she died. Unlike Kossula and Redoshi, McCrear had far fewer memories of the land of her birth or the Middle Passage which meant she had less to share with the journalists and anthropologists, like Zora Neale Hurston, who emerged in the 1920s seeking the ancestral stories of a past that was rapidly slipping away. McCrear was taken at such a young age that slavery deprived her even of the knowledge that would have left an identifiable trail for later researchers to easily find.

The story of the Clotilda’s survivors began just before dawn one April morning in 1860, in a town called Tarkar, located in what is today southwest Nigeria. The farmers who in the cool predawn had left through Tarkar’s eight gates to work the fields of corn, melons, and nuts were already dead, killed silently by their attackers before they could raise the alarm. Most of the remaining townsfolk were asleep in their homes. Shouting and gunfire startled them awake; some, like 15-year-old Abaché, immediately jumped out of bed and tried to make a run for the safety of the forest. Redoshi, aged 12, also tried to run, but she was quickly caught: “I fought,” Redoshi said later, “but they beat me. I don’t know what they were saying, but it wasn’t good.” Women warriors with shaved heads chopped at Tarkar’s gates with axes and machetes and fired flintlock muskets at anyone who appeared to be resisting capture. A second line of male warriors caught anyone else trying to escape.

Redoshi couldn’t understand her captors because they were from the neighboring Kingdom of Dahomey, an aggressive, expansionist realm of warriors and slave-raiders best known for its famous corps of women warriors. The reasons for Dahomey’s rise and increasing antagonism were straightforward: The long-lived Oyo Empire of western Nigeria and eastern Benin had disintegrated in the opening decades of the 19th century, clearing the way for Dahomey to use its well-equipped standing army to terrorize neighboring Yoruba communities like Tarkar. Slave-raiding was far more profitable for the kings of Dahomey than selling palm-oil to European merchants; it also provided them with the firearms that made the kingdom a powerful military force, and the trade goods that made its kings and nobles wealthy. European demand for enslaved people continued unabated even after the slave trade was made illegal, and Dahomey’s leaders consciously exploited that demand to advance their own political agenda in West Africa. As with Moll and the Indian slave trade we discussed a few weeks ago, it was a combination of indigenous agency and priorities, combined with the demand for enslaved bodies in the Americas, that powered the slave trade.

The people of Tarkar were unlucky to live so close to Dahomey. They were well aware of the danger; military training was standard for the young men of the town, like Kossula, who spent his later teenage years learning to use the spear and bow. Faced with a much larger attacking force and no warning, however, Tarkar never stood a chance. The gates fell quickly to the experienced Dahomey warriors, who had plenty of practice efficiently sacking settlements like Tarkar. Kossula remembered that the women were too strong to fight, even though he was a strong young man himself. Hundreds of Tarkar’s residents were captured. The rest were killed, shot with muskets or cut down with thick-bladed swords. Tarkar’s ruler was dragged before the king of Dahomey and beheaded after refusing to become a prisoner. Many others were likewise decapitated, and the soldiers took the heads with them as trophies along with their living captives.

The raid was over by dawn. As the burning sun rose in the sky, the captives were chained around the neck with irons and placed in a long line to be forcibly marched for long hours through the forest. Six children accompanied one woman, then around the age of 30, who would later be renamed “Gracie” by her Alabama master. The youngest of these six children was just two years old, and it was this toddler who would come to be known as Matilda McCrear, the last survivor of the Transatlantic slave trade. The column made camp that night. The next day, the decapitated heads of Tarkar’s slain inhabitants began to rot in the sun and heat. The second night, the Dahomey warriors stuck the heads on poles and smoked them above the fire, an event Kossula was able to recall in detail more than six decades later.

After two weeks of marching through three coastal slave-ports, including Lagos, the future capital of Nigeria, the captives arrived at Ouidah, located in present-day Benin. Millions upon millions of newly enslaved people had passed through Ouidah on their way to the New World over the past two centuries. Kossula, Redoshi, and Matilda McCrear were among the very last.

---

After several weeks imprisoned in Ouidah’s holding-pens, or barracoons, the captives from Tarkar were loaded onto the ship that would carry them across the Atlantic to Mobile Bay: the Clotilda. Compared to many of the vessels that had made the crossing over the past 200 years, the Clotilda was relatively small, a two-masted schooner weighing some 120 tons and measuring 86 feet long and 23 feet wide with a six-foot-deep hull. Constructed in 1855 by enslaved laborers at a shipyard north of Mobile, the Clotilda’s was an unusually large, deep hull for a schooner putatively intended for use in the Gulf of Mexico.

In its first years of service, the Clotilda officially carried sugar, salt, animal hides, cotton, meat, whiskey, and lumber on its many voyages between Mobile, New Orleans, Texas, Mexico, and Cuba. But the ship’s unusually large hold offers some clues as to its truer, darker purposes: Even in its voyages around the Gulf, the Clotilda could well have been involved in trafficking enslaved people from Cuba, where enforcement of the slave-trading ban was intermittent at best. In January 1857, the Clotilda arrived in New Orleans, its cargo unspecified. The local firm with which it was dealing had links to the slave trade; the very next year, 1858, members of that firm would be named as unindicted co-conspirators in a scheme to transport 300 captives from Africa to Cuba. Smuggling human beings in defiance of the 1808 US ban on the slave trade was common practice. Demand for enslaved labor was rising, not falling, as the United States teetered closer toward Civil War. The profits could be immense: Captives purchased for $100 in West Africa could be sold for $600 in Cuba or $1,000 in New Orleans or Mobile. Proponents of reopening the slave trade - and there were many, and not just in the American South - were perfectly aware of that math.

It was the hunt for those outstanding profits that drew together a diverse consortium of investors for the Clotilda’s proposed voyage to West Africa: Nova Scotia-born shipwrights, doctors and lawyers, some of Alabama’s richest planters, and a trio of Maine-born brothers, the Meahers, who had relocated to the Mobile area to exploit the demand for lumber and ships. James Meaher, the eldest, ran the brothers’ steamboat and lumber businesses; the younger two, Thomas and Burns, captained steamboats. Burns stood a towering 6-foot-3 and had recently received a vicious knife wound running from his arm to his shoulder, leaving a distinctive scar: The knife had been wielded by Burns’s steamboat clerk, just to give you a sense of the kind of people we’re talking about here. The Meaher brothers took the lead in planning the voyage, gathering individual $1,000 investments from some of Alabama’s most prolific enslavers. These men had already shown an interest in flouting the ban, having supported the pro-slavery adventurer William Walker’s attempt to conquer Nicaragua in 1855. There was a growing movement in the South to reopen the slave trade, supported by both economic incentives and the strains of the pro-slavery movement that would eventually lead to secession. The Meahers meant to capitalize on it.

The Meahers, along with the Clotilda’s builder and captain William Foster, prepared carefully for their scheme. They reinforced the ship’s masts and spars to hold a greater weight of canvas, allowing for greater speeds on the open Atlantic; after loading the hold with provisions, they placed layers of fresh-cut timber on top to conceal far more food and water than they could possibly need to reach their claimed destination, the Caribbean island of St. Thomas. Upon arrival in West Africa, the crew would use the lumber to build platforms for the captives in the hold. Foster came on board on the morning of March 4th, secreting in the captain’s cabin a bag of gold that he would eventually use to purchase the enslaved captives. Aside from Foster, the Clotilda’s 11-man crew had no idea they were going to Africa; that wasn’t clear until the vessel arrived at the Cape Verde islands off the African coast in mid-April of 1860. The sailors were, predictably, angry, since the voyage was far longer than they had anticipated, as well as much more dangerous, not least because what they were doing was completely illegal. Foster was forced to offer them double wages, which they accepted. Money always talked in the slave trade.

While the Clotilda was evading Portuguese anti-slavery patrols on its way to Ouidah, the captives from Tarkar sweltered and suffered in the horrendous barracoons, circular slave-pens with thatched roofs, high bamboo walls, and little ventilation. Matilda McCrear, Kossula, Redoshi, and the others in their group spent two weeks packed together in the barraccoons before Foster and the Clotilda arrived. Unlike the prisoners, Foster was received in style by the king of Dahomey; following eight days of negotiations, the captain agreed to exchange $9,000 dollars in gold, plus cloth and alcohol, for 125 captives. Foster inspected each one carefully, taking only the strongest and healthiest, as they had the best chance of surviving the Middle Passage and would prove the most valuable to Alabama buyers. The captain preferred children and teenagers, like 19-year-old Kossula, who remembered how invasive the inspection was: Foster had examined his face, stuck his hands in his mouth, and though Kossula didn’t mention it, had looked at his genitals as well.

It’s impossible to imagine the horror of the scene, which had played out millions of times at Ouidah over the past two centuries. Two-year-old Matilda McCrear was too young to understand what was happening, but her mother, Gracie, wasn’t: Foster selected Matilda, her three older sisters, and Gracie for purchase, but not Matilda’s two older brothers. She and Gracie would never see the boys again. Another young woman, Bougier, was separated from all three of her children, one of whom was an infant. A young man named Yawith was ripped away from his two children. That night, the Dahomeyan guards provided a large feast for the 125 captives before their departure, which only intensified their sense of impending doom. They didn’t know where, exactly, they were going, but it was clear that they would never see their families again.

The chains came out again the next morning, binding groups of eight men and boys before they were fastened with padlocks. The women and girls were roped together. Gracie carried Matilda, who was too young to walk by herself, as they crossed a wide stretch of marsh with water so deep that it nearly drowned the shorter captives. Then came the beach and their first sight of the Clotilda, anchored a mile or so out to sea, just a smudge on the horizon. The canoes that rowed them out to the Clotilda managed to avoid capsizing in the heavy surf, but the boatmen did strip the people of Tarkar of their clothes, leaving them effectively naked on board the ship. There was, however, a problem: Once 75 of the 125 captives had been loaded, the sailors on board the Clotilda spotted two steamboats bearing down on them. The ship, and its highly illegal cargo, had been spotted by an anti-slavery patrol. Only 110 captives were brought on board before the Clotilda high-tailed it. Matilda, tragically, was among them.

It was May 24th, 1860, and for the next 13 days, young Matilda and her fellow captives would be locked inside the hold: no respite, no breaks on deck, just unbearable and neverending heat, thirst, and filth of 110 people forced into close proximity with one another in a confined space. The Clotilda wasn’t as crowded as some slave ships - 79 of the 487 captives on board the last ship to arrive in the United States two years earlier had died of suffocation and disease - but it was still pure hell. Kossula remembered the thirst; Redoshi, then twelve years old, remembered preferring death to life; Matilda McCrear didn’t remember the crossing at all, but her mother, Gracie, told her that it was “evil smelling.” On the twelfth day, the Clotilda passed the final headland on the African coast before the open ocean, Cape Palmas in present-day Liberia, but a sighting of yet another anti-slavery patrol made Foster wary of letting the captives out on deck until they were at sea. Finally they were brought up out of the hold, so weak and drained that they could barely stand. Bougier, who had been separated from her children in Ouidah, later remembered “she can’t see nothing, just endless water.”

For the next 32 days sailing across the Atlantic, the captives were allowed on deck more frequently, but Foster scanned the horizon endlessly with his spyglass, keeping an eye out for more patrols. Anytime he spotted another sail, the captives were forced back into the hold. Any sense of time disappeared: Kossula thought the voyage took 70 days, not 44; Redoshi thought it might have taken a year. The horrors continued as they traveled: At least seven captives died at sea, including a young boy, Matilda McCrear’s cousin. Each one was unceremoniously dumped overboard and taken by sharks. . On the 37th day, the Clotilda passed the Bahamas. The danger of anti-slavery patrols rose dramatically, but Foster had a solution: He removed the additional sails and yards that had allowed the ship to cross the Atlantic so easily, making the vessel look like any other Gulf schooner. On July 7th, their journey was nearly at an end: they had, at last, reached the waters off Mobile Bay.

For Foster and the crew, trouble was afoot. The lookout who was supposed to have spotted the ship coming into the bay wasn’t there, and the sailors threatened to kill Foster if he didn’t pay them what he owed. Foster was able to calm them and left the Clotilda to rally his co-conspirators for the final stage of the voyage. The Meaher brothers arr anged for a steamboat to pull the Clotilda up Mobile Bay, with the captives forced to spend all day lying in the sweltering hold, with temperatures reaching over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. At night, the ship and its tug navigated the narrow waters of the Spanish River to avoid the customs post on the Mobile River; Foster and his crew eventually heard the eleven o’clock bell ring out in Mobile, and they stopped for good at Twelve Mile Island, well above the port proper. There, the captives were forced onto a waiting steamboat called the Czar and once again locked in the hold for a daylong journey up the Mobile River to a plantation owned by one of the conspirators, a man named John Dabney. Once the captives were offloaded, the Clotilda was set aflame and scuttled to destroy the evidence of their crime. The sailors who had crewed the Clotilda left the Czar for another waiting steamboat, the Roger B. Taney, fittingly named after the infamous Supreme Court Chief Justice who authored the Dredd Scott decision three years earlier. The double wages Foster had promised his outlaw crew never materialized; instead, he threatened them with a pair of pistols and told them to “hit the grit and never be seen in Southern waters again.” They were on the mail train from Montgomery to New York the next day.

The Clotilda’s arrival was known almost immediately, of course, and the local customs officer informed the Secretary of the Treasury, who ordered an investigation. A schooner doesn’t anchor itself in Mobile Bay and spontaneously combust, after all. As the investigation got underway, the conspirators shuttled the captives around in smaller groups to avoid detection by the authorities. The prisoners from Tarkar were in terrible condition, afflicted with parasites, various intestinal and skin conditions, and perhaps scurvy as well: Redoshi remembered eating grass before she was eventually given cornmeal and water. The captives were then taken to Burns Meaher’s plantation another 50 miles upriver - he was the Meaher brother who’d been gashed with the knife - where the survivors were finally sold. Day after day, the remaining captives were forced to stand in rows while potential buyers inspected them in degradingly invasive ways, and two by two, they were marched away from Burns Meaher’s plantation to their new lives of enslavement. This was perhaps the most difficult moment of all for Kossula, Redoshi, Gracie, little Matilda McCrear, and the rest: another forced separation, this time from the only people who could understand exactly what they’d been through together. A former Alabama state legislator named Washington McMurray Smith purchased Redoshi and another man, whom she was forced to marry. One of the Meaher brothers kept Kossula. Families once again endured the incomparably agonizing horror of separation: Matilda McCrear, her mother Gracie, and her 10-year-old sister Sally were all purchased by Memorable Walker Creagh, one of the largest enslavers in his county, but not Matilda’s two older sisters.

We in the 21st century know that the Civil War would soon formally end slavery for the survivors of the Clotilda and millions of others, but they couldn’t know that. The next five years saw them all experiencing the everyday cruelty and degradation of enslaved life in the American South: long days of brutal work, vicious overseers, severe punishments for escape attempts, and sexual assault aimed at producing future children for the auction block. The conspirators who facilitated the Clotilda’s journey and enslaved the survivors were never held accountable for what they’d done.

The Clotilda survivors lived on after the end of the Civil War brought emancipation to Alabama. A group tried to raise enough money to fund their return to Africa, but the amounts involved were simply too great; instead, some purchased a plot of land from Timothy Meaher, one of the brothers who had enslaved them, and established a new community called Africatown. In 1914, when the artist and writer Emma Langdon Roche visited Kossula, there were eight survivors of the Clotilda left. Roche reported that they still preferred to speak Yoruba among themselves, and Kossula had given his children both American and Yoruba names. Those old enough to remember life before enslavement worked hard not to forget what had been taken from them. Despite the passage of so many years, it was still difficult for Kossula and Redoshi to discuss the circumstances of their capture and transportation. Some survivors refused to speak of it altogether. Matilda McCrear may have been too young to remember much of anything, but she bore the trauma of the events like everyone else. Still, the Clotilda’s survivors worked hard to make good lives for themselves. They created families, traditions, and a lasting legacy out of the worst possible circumstances ever brought upon human beings.

When she died in 1940, McCrear was the last known survivor of the Transatlantic slave trade. One perspective might see her death as the close of a particularly dark chapter in human history, and that’s reasonable enough; when events pass out of living memory, a shift has absolutely occurred in time and space. But the legacy of the Middle Passage and the slave trade are still with us each and every day. The Clotilda’s prisoners were the last of millions who, together, quite literally made and remade the United States. What was done to them - not happened, was done, by people who knew full well what they were doing - was a monstrous crime at the time, and it remains a grisly stain on the soul of this country today. It will for as long as we as a country choose to ignore or deny it. Those who minimize the many impacts of slavery, whether they’re politicians or talking heads on cable news or content creators on social media, ought to be forced to read accounts like that of the Clotilda survivors, people like Kossula, Redoshi, and Matilda McCrear, until their eyes bleed. It’s the least any of us can do now in the present: To bear witness to the crime that was chattel slavery in America, to understand how it shaped the world in which we live now, and try to work against the myriad effects that have trickled down through the years. We—all of us—live daily in the shadow of history. It cannot be ignored or denied, in no small part because people like Matilda passed their memories of it down to us.

That’s why history matters.

This marks the end of our first season’s scripted episodes. I’ve learned so much while researching and writing these, and I appreciate you all joining me on the journey.

Thanks so much for joining me, and I look forward to chatting with you again. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to our Patreon. It’s only 7 bucks a month, and you get access to tons of bonus content, like interviews with great scholars, Q&As with me, our book club, and much more. You can follow me on Instagram or on Bluesky.

Past Lives is a 100-percent independent production, and your support is what allows us to make this show. So, thank you.

Past Lives is written and narrated by me, Patrick Wyman. The producer is Morgan Jaffe. The music and sound design is by Gabriel Gould. The story editor is Rachel Kambury.

Subscribe to Past Lives and don’t forget to sign up for the Past Lives Patreon!

Moll walked through the narrow streets of Boston’s North End with her head held high. She had to look confident, she thought, as if she had every right in the world to be going on about her business here. As far as Moll was concerned, she did; her owner, John Jenkins, would disagree on the strongest possible terms, and reward her pertinence with a blow from the back of his hand. Never again, Moll told herself. She was leaving, and Jenkins would never find her.

Moll limped as she walked, her going burdened by a thick bundle of clothing slung over her shoulder. Her hip always hurt, and one of her feet dragged along the ground. That shoe always wore out before the other one, another thing Jenkins and his harridan wife abused her for. Memory after memory brutalized her in quick succession: the master’s fist cuffing Moll upside the back of her head, the mistress’s screeching about finding a stick to beat Moll for neglecting the firewood. It was all enough to make Moll sag and slow her pace.

Subscribe to Past Lives on your platform of choice, or listen here:

But then she straightened and sped up. Jenkins and the mistress couldn’t tell her what to do, not anymore. She had money, hard silver coin and some paper, and spare clothing to replace the stuffed plaid jacket she usually wore. She could feel the sweat gathering underneath her thick coat. The Boston summer was warm, though not as warm as the swampy humidity of the south where she was born. Not that Moll wanted to go back to the Carolinas, not now: Her family was all gone, killed or taken captive like her, and she had been so young when the Yamasee warriors came to her village. Even if she wanted to go back home, she couldn’t remember where home was.

Moll pushed through the knots of sailors crowding the streets. They stank of sea salt and tar, just like Jenkins did whenever he returned from one of his long voyages to Barbados or Charles Town. The sense memory made her shudder. The only way she would ever get on a ship again was if she decided where it was going. Never again would someone else - not Jenkins, not anyone - make that decision for her. For now, though, Moll was just walking: walking away from Jenkins and the North End, walking toward a new life. She had emancipated herself, and even if Jenkins did find Moll, he could never take that away from her.

---

When we think of slavery in the Americas, the horrors of the Middle Passage and the enslavement of more than 12 million Africans is, understandably and rightfully, the first thing to come to mind. Huge ships trafficking hundreds of captives at a time, a racial caste system of unparalleled power and durability, plantations worked by enslaved labor producing for the global market: these are all hallmarks of the system that was chattel slavery, which dominated the Caribbean and the American South for centuries. Our impressions of that system aren’t wrong. African enslavement in the Americas is one of the most brutal, degrading, and horrific forms of the practice we have in the historical record. Its legacy is a living one, and it lives alongside us every day.

But African enslavement wasn’t the only form of slavery in the Americas. The Middle Passage wasn’t the only route by which formerly free people were made into property. In North America alone - leaving aside Spanish practices throughout their vast New World empire - tens of thousands of indigenous people were abducted and sold into slavery. As many or more were forced into less intense but still exploitative and degrading forms of unfreedom, such as indentured servitude. Once taken, these people were commodified and injected into the same farflung networks of trade and forced migration that trafficked enslaved Africans everywhere from New England to Barbados.

The Indian slave trade - I’m following the general terms preferred within the discipline here - is much better understood today than it was even a few decades ago. Its tributaries reached deep into the North American interior, tying villages along the Ohio River to plantations in the Caribbean and London tea houses where drinkers sweetened their beverages with sugar. The demand for slaves among European colonists decimated indigenous communities, creating an environment of war and predation that shattered old tribal confederacies. New slaving societies emerged on the fringes of the colonies, exchanging deer skins and human beings for valued trade goods, especially firearms; the precarious settlements clinging to the eastern seaboard were more often dependent on these powerful indigenous groups than vice versa.

This was the world in which a young indigenous child was captured somewhere in the Carolinas, transported north to Boston, and enslaved for years before emancipating herself and escaping in 1711. Her name - at least the name her owner had given her - was Moll. We know that Moll existed because her owner, a man named John Jenkins, placed a fugitive slave ad in the Boston News-Letter, the first continuously running newspaper in the colonies. Jenkins’ description of Moll and her actions is all we have to go on, but it’s more than enough to place her amid the currents of her time and place. We can see the threads of much larger systems and events attached to her: the fragmentation of indigenous societies in the American southeast, the emergence of worldwide trade networks that relied on the enslavement of people to make a profit, and the global imperial competitions that defined the 18th century. Moll will be our guide to all of that.

A quick note on sources here: I’m relying on Antonio T. Bly, Escaping Slavery: A Documentary History of Native Ameri Runaways in British North America; Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade; and the relevant chapters in the edited volume Indian Slavery in Colonial America.

Let’s start by trying to make sense of the American southeast, the region in which Moll was born. The newspaper advertisement refers to Moll as a “ Indian,” a broad categorization applied to indigenous people taken captive somewhere in the triangle between North Carolina, Florida, and the Mississippi River. By the early 18th century, when Moll was enslaved and transported, this region looked nothing like it did 200 years earlier when Europeans first reported their impressions of the area. The Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto traveled through the region with a large armed force between 1539 and 1543, and several of his companions wrote accounts of what they saw. These are our only firsthand descriptions of a series of indigenous societies that scholars call “Mississippian,” a long-lasting and widespread cultural grouping spanning much of the southeastern and midwestern United States. Mississippian societies were linguistically and ethnically diverse, but otherwise shared many similarities. All were based on maize agriculture, which had been introduced to the southeast around 1000 AD. Populations rose as productivity increased; maize, unlike previous staples, could be grown in much greater quantities and stored for longer. Before long, chiefdoms and even small-scale states covered the entire region. The largest and best-known of these today is Cahokia, located in southern Illinois, with its enormous, extraordinarily labor-intensive earthen mounds.

Mound-building is a form of monumental construction, and while there are cases in the historical and archaeological record of egalitarian societies creating these kinds of structures, the Mississippian groups weren’t among them. These were hierarchical societies with chiefs of varying ranks leading different groups. Some chiefs controlled a single village; others, like those leading Cahokia, controlled entire networks of villages by virtue of their religious prestige and authority. The largest settlements could have thousands of inhabitants, specialized craft production, and active trade links spanning hundreds of miles. The huge mounds constructed at the chiefs’ direction were centers of ritual power and practice, and the chiefs presided over the ceremonies that regularly took place : These were fundamentally unequal societies, with some above and many others below; archaeological evidence speaks to inherited inequalities across generations, visible in everything from nutrition to the kinds of grave goods with which people were buried. The Mississippian world was intensely competitive, and these elites - and the small-scale polities they ruled - were constantly rising and falling over decades; no single polity, not even Cahokia, was ever able to consolidate control for long.

When de Soto arrived in the region in 1539, the Mississippian world was already in deep decline: Many of its major population centers, like Cahokia, had been abandoned for a century or more. The accounts we read of sophisticated, hierarchical, densely populated chiefdoms centered on towns describe a series of societies that wouldn’t exist even a century later. Whatever led to this decline was already happening before de Soto, much less English colonists, ever set foot in the region, but it was the downstream effects of European colonization that destroyed it for good.

By the time Moll was born around 1690, that same world looked much different than it had even when de Soto’s expedition rampaged through the southeast. Only a couple of those deeply rooted chiefdoms remained, such as the Natchez along the lower Mississippi. The Spanish had been established in Florida for more than a century, and took a slow approach to missionizing and controlling the indigenous peoples of the peninsula; the English and French were much more recent arrivals, but it was those twenty-some years prior to Moll’s birth that had been most disruptive. The last remnants of the Mississippian world were splintering, the pressure of integration shattering them into a new series of global trade and political networks, and new peoples and practices were emerging in the rubble of the old. The course of Moll’s life, her journey from Carolina to Boston, was the direct result of these enormous, overarching changes in what scholars refer to as the “Mississippian Shatter Zone.”

We don’t know where exactly within this vast space Moll came from, but the underlying dynamics were similar whether she was enslaved in northern Florida, the upper reaches of the Savannah River, or the environs of the Mississippi itself. As European traders and colonists arrived in the closing decades of the 17th century, they found themselves in a complex relationship with their indigenous neighbors. Whether English, French, or Spanish, they were always outnumbered, their foothold precarious; successful colonies had to play a Byzantine game of politics with a bewildering variety of indigenous groups just to survive. A concerted effort by any of the new emerging indigenous groups, such as the Westo and Creek, could have wiped the nascent English colony of South Carolina, or French Louisiana, off the map without much effort. The fact that indigenous groups didn’t do this was a matter of choice, not capability: They wanted the Europeans nearby, albeit at arm’s length and at a manageable level of power, because they were such a valuable source of trade goods.

The indigenous powers rising in the south at this time were fundamentally new, featuring entirely new ethnic groups, which were far more warlike and trade-oriented than their predecessors. Scholars call these “coalescent” societies, in that we can quite literally see in our sources the process of group formation happening as a result of identifiable trends. Groups like the Chickasaws and Creeks to the west emerged as slaving societies at precisely this time. The two commodities European colonists valued most were deer hides and people, and people were far more valuable than hides. Firearms were by far the most valued commodity indigenous people received in return, providing the direct means of acquiring still more captives and thus wealth, fueling further warfare and captive-taking.

This is a fundamental point that is too often overlooked in textbook accounts of colonial America: Both individually and collectively, indigenous people weren’t passive recipients of European colonialism. Many were active agents, often the most important ones, in creating the new world. Indian slavery is the perfect example of this. Unfreedom of varying kinds and degrees probably existed among Mississippian societies long before the first European set foot in Florida. There were certainly people we would call enslaved living in the places de Soto’s expedition visited, which hardly makes Mississippian groups unique in the Americas. Captives taken in the raids and low-intensity warfare that defined Mississippian life might be tortured and killed, adopted into a kin-group to replace a deceased member, or put to work, much like enslaved people elsewhere in the world; what changed with the arrival of the English and the French was the commodification of those captives and their being folded into trade networks that spanned the eastern seaboard and the Caribbean. A person abducted and enslaved by a group de Soto encountered in 1540 couldn’t end up in Massachusetts; Moll could, and did.

---

The only source that tells us Moll existed is an advertisement, otherwise known as a fugitive slave ad, that her owner placed in the Boston News-Letter on August 13th, 1711, after she emancipated herself. It’s worth reading it in its entirety: “Ran away from her Master, John Jenkins of Boston Mariner, the 8th of thus Instant August, a Carolina Indian Maid-Servant, Named Moll, Aged about 20 years, Speaks good English, a short thick fat Wench, having short Hair, is Lame in one of her Hips & goes Wadling; she has carried away Considerable Money, & a bundle of Cloaths. viz. A Pladd Stuff Jacket, broad Check’d a Peticoat small Check’d; an old dark Home-spun Jacket, a dark colour’d Kersey Peticoat, & a strip’d Home-spun Peticoat Cotton & Wool; several Cotton & Linnen Shifts, with some others, several pair of Stockings, & several Lace Caps; blue Gloves, and Shoes about half wore out. Whoever shall take up the said Run-away, & her safely Convey to her above said Master, or give any true lntelligence of her, so as her Master may have her again who Lives at the North End of the Town in Shipstreet, shall be sufficiently rewarded besides all necessary Charges Paid.” This first advertisement evidently didn’t result in Moll’s capture and return, because Jenkins ran the same copy again on August 27th, 1711. That’s the last we hear of Moll, and we’re left to wonder what fate befell her.

This sole advertisement doesn’t seem like much, but it actually gives us a tremendous amount of information about Moll, her personal history, and her circumstances. Let’s break it down piece by piece.

In the advertisement, Jenkins describes Moll as a “Carolina Indian.” This was a generic term for indigenous people from the American southeast, who were generally funneled through the port of Charles Town - now Charleston - on their way to destinations further afield. We’re told that she’s around 20 years old and speaks English fluently, which tells us that she had been in servitude long enough to learn the language of her enslavers; the reasonable assumption is that she was abducted as a child and grew to adulthood while enslaved. Moll had a noticeable limp, we learn, due to an injury to one of her hips, and we’re left to wonder whether that injury was inflicted in the violence that accompanied her initial enslavement. The advertisement provides a detailed physical account: short hair, short stature, a “thick fat Wench,” in Jenkins’ own uncharitable words. We can infer that Moll’s self-emancipation wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment act, because Jenkins tells us that Moll took both money and a substantial amount of clothing with her, enough that she could vary her appearance while evading capture. Jenkins describes himself as a mariner, meaning that he was a skilled seaman, perhaps a navigator or a mate; he wasn’t captain of a ship, however, because other advertisers made it clear when they held that status. His stated location in Boston’s North End was full of other people who made their living from the sea. Jenkins must have been relatively prosperous, considering his investment in a slave and the money Moll took with her when she escaped. Finally, we learn that wherever Moll went on August 8th - the day Jenkins says she ran away - she managed to remain free for nearly three weeks: Jenkins ran the advertisement a second time on August 27th. We can hope that Jenkins’ promise of compensation to whomever helped return Moll to him was never fulfilled, but we simply don’t know.

All this allows us to piece together an outline of Moll’s life and experiences. It’s deeply unfortunate that we can’t pinpoint her origins more precisely: She might have been enslaved any time between the early 1690s and the early 1700s - enough time for her to learn English fluently - when slavers ranged so widely that she might have come from half a dozen different groups. One strong candidate, however, is the southern part of Georgia and Alabama, which experienced a wave of violence during Moll’s teenage years. The enormous conflagration known in Europe as the War of the Spanish Succession also leaked into the Americas, where colonists with loyalties to European empires fought their own smaller but no less nasty conflict. The southeast was particularly active during this time, as English colonists in the Carolinas attacked Spanish missions to their south and the burgeoning French presence to their west, near the Mississippi. Hundreds, even thousands of people were made captive and enslaved in these clashes, and many more were killed.

But viewing these ongoing cycles of raiding and killing as adjuncts to a European war badly warps our understanding of them. These cycles were primarily conflicts among the indigenous groups residing in the southeast; the Europeans provided firearms and lucrative markets for captives, but the men joining warbands and enslaving captives were doing it for their own reasons, not to serve the interests of faraway kings. These activities continued when there were no European conflicts, the same way they had for generations before European demand for slaves and trade goods to pay for them entered the system.

There’s no doubt, however, that European demand - rather than European political goals - incentivized indigenous groups to create more warbands and go on more raids: more raids meant more captives, which meant more firearms, gunpowder and shot, as well as other valued trade goods, but also logically meant that the raiders had fewer nearby enemies. The raided groups retaliated, finding trading partners among other Europeans with whom they could exchange captives for guns and ammunition. It was a vicious cycle that played out all across the southeast. (The other major export from the region, deer hides, were much more labor-intensive to hunt and process and far less valuable than people.) The dynamic was not unlike what we see in West Africa at this time, the interaction between the agency of aggressive indigenous groups and European demand for the enslaved people they could provide.

For their part, European colonists saw nothing wrong with Indian slavery, just as they saw nothing wrong with African slavery. Thousands upon thousands of people were abducted and trafficked throughout North America, transported through ports like Charleston, and sold into new, often miserable lives far from home, with little hope of return. This both empowered some groups and destroyed others, contributing in myriad, devastating ways to the shattering of indigenous societies across the continent. Moll’s life was a product of that world, the nexus between far-flung trade networks feeding European empires and indigenous politics and war.

Whenever and wherever she was taken, Moll’s enslavement was a direct result of these larger processes. After her initial capture, Moll was probably taken to her captors’ village along with anyone else taken during the raid. There, she would have witnessed the torture and execution of male captives; some of her companions may have been adopted into the group to replace slain members, with a couple of others kept in servitude to tend crops and process deer hides. Once enough captives had been collected, the remainder would be taken - probably by boat - down the rivers snaking through the southeast interior toward the coast. We can’t know for sure where exactly Moll was taken, but the most likely destination is Charles Town.

Since its inception, South Carolina’s viability as a colony depended on its relationships with indigenous groups, who provided valuable trade goods for export and military protection. Early colonists in the region grew crops maize and let their cattle roam freely; eventually, rice fields- planted by enslaved Africans - began to appear along the coast and the major navigable rivers. Rice proliferated as a crop because of South Carolina’s deep trade connection to the sugar-planting islands of the Caribbean, which needed food enough to sustain their many thousands of enslaved workers working under the worst possible conditions. Even so, in South Carolina, enslaved indigenous people were still considered more lucrative than rice.

Ironically, there were nowhere as many enslaved indigenous people in South Carolina as the scale of the trade might suggest. The reason for this was straightforward: Because the colony depended so strongly on indigenous groups for protection from both other Europeans and their hostile native neighbors, it was politically unwise to keep large numbers of them enslaved so close at hand. Many of the same people were involved in importing African slaves and exporting indigenous captives. Many of those indigenous captives were sent to the brutal Caribbean sugarcane plantation islands, packed tightly into cargo holds alongside parcels of rice and deerskins. Others, like Moll, were transported north to Boston, one of the rising maritime cities of North America and a center of Atlantic trade.

It’s possible that John Jenkins, Moll’s owner, bought her in Charles Town. He was a mariner, a skilled seaman, and Charleston was a common stopover point for Boston vessels traveling to and from the more lucrative British Caribbean markets like Barbados and Jamaica. Alternatively, one of those Boston vessels could just as easily have dropped off a holdful of rum in Charles Town and picked up a cargo of deerskins and a few enslaved captives to cover the costs of the voyage home. Either way, Moll found herself on a ship cutting through the choppy Atlantic, what was likely a new and terrifying experience for her. She was a child at this point, and she may well have been alone. She may also have been injured: The process of enslavement was violent, and the marked limp Moll had later in life could easily have been the result of an incident during her capture. It could even have been intentionally inflicted to make it harder for her to escape.

Once she arrived in Boston, Moll would have seen many other indigenous faces among the descendants of English Puritans. Many of them, like Moll, were enslaved. Some were from the northern colonies or their fringes, places like Rhode Island or Martha’s Vineyard. Others were, like Moll, called “Carolina Indians.” How much kinship Moll would have felt toward these people, with their many linguistic and ethnic differences, is hard to say; the distinction the newspaper advertisements drew between “Spanish” and “Carolina” Indians probably didn’t map well onto the self-understanding of the people Europeans so designated.

Perhaps John Jenkins was Moll’s initial buyer; perhaps he wasn’t. There were many John Jenkins in Massachusetts at this time, and pinpointing which one owned Moll is far beyond my knowledge of and access to those archives. While enslaved, Moll would have been forced to work, carrying out all the tasks an urban household required under the presumed direction of Jenkins’ wife. She had to draw water, wash, clean clothes, cook, haul firewood, weave homespun cloth, and make clothing, contributing in these and other myriad ways to the household economy. By legal definition, Moll was Jenkins’ property; the patchwork laws of the colonies placed few restrictions on the practice, regardless of the enslaved person’s origin. Moll suffered under these conditions for years, long enough for her to learn English and develop an escape plan. She knew where Jenkins and the mistress of the house kept their petty cash; she prepared a bundle of clothing and probably other, less noteworthy items; and she knew where to go to stay off Jenkins’ radar for at least 19 days. Where that was, Jenkins didn’t know, and neither do we.

I hope Moll got away for good, and made a better life for herself, far away from a master who called her mean, cruel things in print and subjected her to even meaner treatment in person, enough to compel her to emancipate herself. There were many others like her, indigenous and African alike, who took her same steps in Boston. The advertisements in the Boston News-Letter are full of calls for the return of escaped indigenous slaves: Will, “a slim tall fellow;” Hector, who escaped from a Royal Navy vessel docked in the harbor; a pair of Carolina Indian men, one branded on the cheeks with a W and a B. Every one of these ads is proof that, whether for a day, a week, or forever, people who had once been enslaved made themselves free.

Next time on Past Lives, we reach the apex of slavery, the most infamous manifestation of the system with which we’re all familiar: the Transatlantic African slave trade. In the next episode, we’ll meet a man named Olaudah Equiano, whose life’s journey took him from Africa to the Caribbean to the most distant reaches of the Atlantic. We’re incredibly fortunate to have Equiano’s own account of his remarkable life, and we’ll explore it together.

Until then, thanks so much for joining me, and I look forward to chatting with you again. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to our Patreon. It’s only 7 bucks a month, and you get access to tons of bonus content, like interviews with great scholars, Q&As with me, our book club, and much more. You can follow me on Instagram or on Bluesky.

Past Lives is a 100-percent independent production, and your support is what allows us to make this show. So, thank you.

Past Lives is written and narrated by me, Patrick Wyman. The producer is Morgan Jaffe. The music and sound design is by Gabriel Gould. The story editor is Rachel Kambury.

Subscribe to Past Lives and don’t forget to sign up for the Past Lives Patreon!

The wind never stopped here. Patricius ran, hard and fast, through the woods of Focluth, buffeted by the gusts at his back. The many branches above and around him rattled and shook in the wind blowing in from the open ocean a few miles away. It always carried an icy edge that chilled anyone standing in its path to the bone. More often than not, rain came with it in great sheets of driving bullets that stung where they struck skin. Patricius had thought he knew rain and wind and cold before the raiders snatched him from his home in Britain and brought him across the sea to this foreign land. He had been wrong about so many things.

That was six years ago. Six years of cold, wet nights camped on green hills with the flocks of sheep his master made him tend. Patricius hadn’t felt warm since the day the Irish slavers came to his father’s villa and herded him, and so many others, onto waiting boats. Then came the short, storm-lashed crossing, the long forced marches along muddy roads with chains and ropes chafing at his limbs, the incessant blisters on his feet, and the sting of his master’s hand. It was cold and wet up in the hills with the sheep, but at least there he wasn’t constantly at risk of a beating for a wayward word or perceived cheek.

Subscribe to Past Lives on your platform of choice, or listen here:

His bare, frozen feet sank into the mud of the forest path; his soaked wool tunic clung to his chafed legs. But now Patricius heard the voice of God telling him it was time to leave. He thought it was God’s voice, at least; he had sometimes wondered if it was despair or madness speaking to him, or one of the ancient spirits of this benighted land, but here and now in the woods of Focluth, he was certain it was God. Patricius would return home. God would make it so, because Patricius was now a slave of God, no longer his master’s property. He had nothing to fear. God told him so.

Slaves were rarely freed here in Ireland. His father, a Roman, had always treated the slaves he owned decently, and had freed several of them over the years, Patricius remembered. For a while after his own capture, he had held out hope that he might eventually leave captivity. But these Irish were barbarians compared to the Romans amongst whom he’d grown up.

The wind at Patricius’s back ebbed as he ran deeper into the woods. The rain continued to fall, trickling down through the branches, but it was slowing. He heard the voice again, telling him to continue, to not stop, that God was with him. One day, Patricius promised himself, he would return here, and bring the word of God to his former enslavers.

Alongside Attila the Hun and the Prophet Muhammad, Saint Patrick is probably the single best-known person who lived in the period we call Late Antiquity, spanning the fourth to the eighth centuries AD. He was the Apostle of the Irish, a towering figure who converted a formerly pagan people to Christianity, the foundation of the vibrant Christian culture that would eventually reach far beyond that small island. He also drove out the snakes, if the legends are to be believed. For most, that’s precisely what Patrick is: a legend who barely even belongs in a past world that actually existed.

But Saint Patrick - Patricius - was a real person, and the world he lived in was very real. He was born and grew up somewhere in western Britain while the Roman Empire fell apart. At some point, raiders from Ireland captured him, took him across the Irish Sea, and enslaved him for a period of years. Eventually, he escaped back to Britain, became a bishop, and then returned to Ireland to convert his former enslavers to Christianity. Enslavement was a central experience in Saint Patrick’s life. It made him who he was and set him on a course to everlasting fame. We know all of this not only because of the many later stories and traditions that circulated about Saint Patrick and his actions, but because he himself wrote about them: Patrick is almost unique in that he is one of the very few people in the ancient world who left any firsthand account of their experience of being enslaved. His Confession, a defense of his actions and his past written amid some indecipherable Church controversy, lays out his version of his life story. He also wrote a second surviving text, Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus, in which he upbraids and excommunicates a British warlord whose Christian soldiers abducted and enslaved some of Patrick’s Christian converts in Ireland.

I care a great deal about Saint Patrick. He’s my namesake, for one, and I remember my extremely Irish-American Catholic grandfather - whose own father was named Patrick - telling me stories about him when I was little. I lived in Ireland for two years, and it was an incredibly formative place and time for me. Beyond that, Saint Patrick inhabited a world in which I’ve spent a lot of my professional time over the past twenty years: the waning days of the Roman Empire in the west. Whatever else he was or became, however later generations remembered him and used his memory, Saint Patrick was first and foremost a product of the late Roman Empire. In today’s episode, we seek to understand Patrick in his context: a very real, and increasingly well-understood world, with the years he was enslaved serving as the defining period of his life. While Patrick eventually became the legend we know today, that’s not what makes him interesting to us; instead, it’s the fact that much of his life echoed broader patterns we rarely see illuminated in such depth. Saint Patrick was one of history’s Great Men, but Patricius the slave wasn’t.

A quick note here: For this episode, I’m relying a great deal on a recent book by the scholar Roy Flechner, entitled Saint Patrick Retold. It’s an excellent overview and well worth reading, but there are a few key points I disagree with the author on, which I’ll discuss further in a moment.

Patrick was born somewhere in western Britain in the late fourth or early fifth century AD. We don’t know precisely when, because Patrick’s own writings give us almost no temporal markers to work with. At one point he refers to the Franks of Gaul as a pagan people, which tells us he lived before the year 500 or so; later writings give two dates of death, 457 and 493 AD, with most scholars preferring the latter. Roy Flechner argues that Patrick lived even earlier than the mid-fifth century AD, placing his key actions in the late fourth century, but I disagree with that: His reasoning rests on the idea that Romanness was well and truly dead in Britain by the dates traditionally associated with Patrick’s life. I don’t think we can say that with any confidence. We have practically no surviving texts from Britain in that period, and reading identity through archaeology is a tricky business. Archaeologically, the material markers of Rome were disappearing from Britain over the course of the fifth century; we have no idea how people thought of themselves or what languages they spoke on a day-to-day basis.

But we do know Patrick was a Roman, or had at the very least grown up in a world of Romans. He wrote in Latin, and his language makes it obvious that he had received some of the standard Roman education. He tells us that his father was a decurion, a member of a city council with administrative responsibilities. At the very beginning of his letter to the soldiers of Coroticus, he says: “I live among barbarian peoples, an exile on account of the love of God.” Some have suggested that by “barbarians,” he means non-Christians, and I don’t think that’s right: He distinguishes explicitly between Christians and pagans elsewhere, and doesn’t use “Roman” as a synonym for “Christian” at any point. For Patrick, like many other Latin authors of the fifth century (and I’ve read nearly all of them), the counterpoint to “barbarians” wasn’t “Christians,” but Romans. Patrick tells us implicitly on which side of that divide he belongs. His Britain sat at the very edges of the Roman world, but it was still recognizably part of the Roman world, even at this late date.

Britain had been a Roman province for more than 300 years by the time Patrick was born. Conquered by the Romans piece by piece in the years after the emperor Claudius’s invasion in 43 AD, Britain held the claim (a good one) to being the empire’s most distant outpost. In both space and thought Britain was further from the Mediterranean heart of the empire than all of the outposts dotting the edges of the Sahara or looking up at the peaks of the Caucasus Mountains. Despite that distance, by the time of Patrick’s birth, Britain was as Roman as anywhere in the empire.

What does that mean, exactly? The late Roman Empire into which Patrick was born wasn’t a homogeneous place. Dozens of languages were spoken inside its frontiers, from Syriac and Greek to Frankish and Gaulish. Wheat, olives, and grapes were the empire’s holy trifecta of Mediterranean foodstuffs, but olives and grapes didn’t grow through much of its territory; local people continued to eat the same kinds of foods as they had before the Romans arrived, with a few additions. Local gods stuck around, either on their own or assimilated with Roman deities. The aristocrats filling town councils and later acting as bishops were almost certainly descended, at least in part, from the people who had been powerful in those regions prior to conquest. Decades of recent research has made it clear that even after centuries of Roman rule, there was no evenly distributed process of “Romanization.” There were shepherds in the Balkans speaking Illyrian and farmers in Wales conversing in British Celtic, living in ways that differed little from those of their ancestors before Roman armies arrived. In a state with tens of millions of inhabitants, diversity was the rule by necessity.

Despite all that variety, there were plenty of commonalities between subjects of the empire, some cultural and some material. Latin was spoken everywhere by the late fourth century, from the Adriatic to Hadrian’s Wall and the Sahara to the Rhine. Where common folk continued to use other tongues, they were often bilingual, using their native language at home and Latin in the marketplace. Latin was spoken so widely that it had distinctive regional varieties and accents; a well-traveled individual could distinguish a native of Roman Britain from a person raised in Italy or North Africa purely by their speech. Still, those regional varieties were mutually intelligible, probably more so than English as it’s spoken around the world today. Latin was the language of administration and the army, so when citizens interacted with the state, they did so through Latin. On a deeper level, when asked, practically every free person living in the Roman Empire - no matter what they spoke at home or where they lived - would identify themselves as a Roman. That was true in the Greek-speaking east, in the venerable and still-enormous city of Rome, and in the rain-drenched hills facing the Irish Sea, where Saint Patrick was born and raised. There were plenty of divisions within Roman society, particularly based on wealth and whether a person held office, and many different forms of identity; but nearly every free person would, on some level, have considered themselves to be Roman. When Patrick refers to himself as the son of a decurion, he’s telling his readers precisely where he belonged in the Roman social hierarchy.

Cities were the places most tied to long-distance trade and migration networks, the most important nodes in the economic and political systems keeping the Roman world alive. Rome, Carthage, Milan, Trier, Arles, Tarragona, and dozens of others were the linchpins of Romanness. They were the settlements most likely to have huge quantities of Roman coins and pottery; to be built along the standardized grid patterns the Romans preferred; and to show evidence of Roman religious cults and cultural practices, like inscriptions. New ways of speaking, like accents and slang, tended to start in cities, and to jump between them rather than slowly seeping into the countryside. We could pick up Londinium in the middle of the fourth century AD and put it on the Seine or the Ebro and it wouldn’t have been out of place.

The further one traveled from the cities, the more things were made and consumed locally. Old pre-Roman methods of production stuck around either because there was no need for them to change, or the locals liked doing things a bit differently than elsewhere; people didn’t change how they made and decorated pottery or their clothing just because they were now ruled by Roman officials. They didn’t immediately start planting vines just because Roman soldiers had come through a few times.

It’s more like Roman material culture was another layer of stuff superimposed onto people’s lives, which over time melded with the old into something new. This happened at the local village level, within cities, and across the region, with all of them differing in some small way from their neighbors. Mass-produced Roman pottery, roof tiles, coins, and metalwork could be found anywhere - the Roman world was kind of like an Ikea in that sense - but not at every site, or every time. One villa might have had a yen for fancy but widely distributed fineware; another splurged on fancy mosaic tiles from a distant workshop but used mostly local pottery; while at a third, the owner had a habit of importing amphorae of fine wine to impress his neighbors. There were many different ways of being Roman, and just as many ways to use objects produced in the empire to display status and identity.

That was the world into which Saint Patrick was born. But that world was crumbling, and nowhere more so than in Britain. Only the northernmost parts of Gaul, what is present-day Belgium and the Low Countries, experienced a faster and more complete devolution. Patrick belonged to the last generation that would grow up with memories of town councils and deliveries of mass-produced trade goods. But unlike many people who lived through what we call the fall of the Roman Empire, he didn’t experience it as a lo ng, quiet transformation; he was quite literally ripped away from that world and made a slave.

While we can’t pinpoint the exact dates of Saint Patrick’s life, it’s not actually that important, because we have almost no knowledge of specific events in Britain during the fifth century AD. We’re not just ignorant of the years in which things took place; we don’t even know exactly what took place. There are no comprehensive narrative histories telling us who did what, who ruled in particular regions, where battles took place or between which forces, much less what people made of the massive upheavals shaping and reshaping their lives. What we have are impressions - vibes, for lack of a better word - from the very few textual sources available to us, and from the immense amount of archaeological material left behind.

The physical evidence of this period tells a stark story. In 350 AD, roughly the year we would assume Saint Patrick’s father was born, Britain was as Roman as anywhere in the Roman Empire; by the time Patrick died, probably sometime in the second half of the fifth century, Britain was completely transformed. Cities like Londinium and Eboracum - York - emptied of people. The market towns scattered across the countryside of lowland Britain were abandoned. The army, the most visible symbol of Roman rule and an essential driver of economic activity, either withdrew from the island completely or stuck around and became local warlords. Coins stopped arriving when the army stopped getting paid, so the economy reverted to barter. The fine villas of the Romano-British aristocracy remained occupied, but their heated baths and mosaic floors fell into disrepair. Anglo-Saxon migrants from the continent’s North Sea coast began settling in the lowlands of eastern Britain; within a couple of centuries, English would be the predominant language in that part of the country, which was well on its way to becoming England.

Patrick probably didn’t experience the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons firsthand, since he lived in the west, but the breakdown of Roman authority was no less noticeable in his part of the island: Picts from north of Hadrian’s Wall and Irish raiders from across the narrow sea attacked formerly safe areas like Patrick’s home, while local strongmen stepped into the power vacuum left by the departing army and disappearin g officials. There are some indications that life was more violent: One study found four times as many identifiable injuries from edged weapons on skeletons in the post-Roman period compared to the era of Roman rule. The canonical date for the army’s exit from Britain is 410 AD, but units had been peeling off for decades before that, and scattered remnants stuck around afterward, sometimes in the same forts legionaries had been occupying for centuries.

Patrick grew up in a place he calls Bannavem Taburniae, which has never been positively identified. The most likely candidates are clustered around the city of Carlisle in Cumbria, which marked the western end of Hadrian’s Wall. This was one of the most remote parts of the Roman Empire, quite literally within sight of a territory where Roman officials held no sway. Yet Patrick’s father was a member of a town council, a decurion, a rank that could be found anywhere west of the Adriatic. He received at least part of the traditional education most well-off Roman boys received, something we can discern from the sprinklings of quotations from the classic texts everyone read. But the best proof of Patrick’s Romanness is in the way he writes, how he assembles sentences in Latin, the words he chooses, the persuasive style he utilizes, and a thousand other details that aren’t visible when reading his writings in translation. Scholars have agreed for a long time that Patrick’s Latin is a bit strange: He wasn’t a native speaker, most say, and some of his weirder word choices, spellings, and sentence structures must therefore have been due to interference from his native - presumably British Celtic - language. But that’s not actually the case.

Way back when I was doing my master’s degree, I got very into late Latin: not the literary style that aristocrats and bishops used to show how learned they were, but the meat and potatoes Latin - spoken and written - that residents of the later Roman Empire used on an everyday basis. Late Latin was well on its way to becoming the Romance languages we know from the Middle Ages and beyond, and its non-literary and spoken forms had diverged a great deal from the ornate, almost impenetrable style favored by pretentious elites. I’m not going to give you a tedious rundown of the sociolinguistics of late Latin or toot my own horn too much, but practically none of the scholars who have studied Patrick’s writings know this material. Had the Anglo-Saxons not migrated in substantial numbers, or Roman rule lasted a little while longer, Britain may well have produced its own Romance language, as Africa was on its way to doing before the Arab conquest. Patrick makes much more sense this way than as a half-competent Latin stylist. There’s no evidence of what we call “bilingual interference” in his Latin, no identifiable sign that he was a native British-speaker whose first language seeped into the way he wrote; the peculiarities in his language aren’t the kinds of mistakes that second-language learners tend to make. In fact, its peculiar qualities are all standard for Latin-speakers who hadn’t been steeped in Latin literary culture: people who, for example, were enslaved in their teen years, missed the final stages of their education, and returned to a place where that education no longer existed.

That was Saint Patrick. Growing up somewhere around the northernmost edge of the Roman Empire, speaking a regional variety of Latin that would have made him understood everywhere from Carthage to Trier to Tarragona, his life straddled the end of one world and the beginning of another. In recent decades, scholars have stressed the slow, often barely noticeable aspects of that shift, calling it a transformation instead of a fall. In Britain, however, the word “fall” makes perfect sense. The lives of real people, people like Patrick, were shaped in enormous ways by the disappearance of the state that had formerly governed them.

Enslavement defined Patrick’s life. As he tells the story in his Confession, he was abducted from his home along with thousands of others when he was 16 years old and taken across the sea to Ireland. His journey didn’t end at Ireland’s eastern shore; from there, he was taken to the far northwest of Ireland, present-day County Mayo, near the open waters of the north Atlantic. For the next six years, he says, his life consisted of tending sheep as an enslaved shepherd. It was during his captivity that he experienced a religious conversion. His father had been a deacon; Patrick was nominally Christian, at the very least, but he hadn’t really believed before this. On his own in a foreign land, with seemingly no chance of escape or freedom, Patrick found solace in the one place he still could: in prayer, building a relationship with a God who had previously been only a distant force in his life. One night, after six years of captivity, Patrick dreamed a voice told him a ship was being prepared to take him back across the sea to Britain. Compelled, he ran away, traveling some 200 Roman miles across Ireland, until he found the promised ship. More trials and tribulations followed, but Patrick eventually returned to his family and resumed his life. But now, he had a mission: He determined that he would one day return to Ireland and convert the people who enslaved him to Christianity. This is where the story of Patricius, a Roman teenager, ends, and the legend of Saint Patrick begins.

There are all sorts of issues with the internal coherence of Patrick’s autobiography, and so little to work with that practically every detail has been called into question in the years since he wrote it: how long he was in Ireland and where he was held; whether he was freed, or ran away; how he managed to convince a shipful of sailors to take him across the sea to Britain; and even whether he was actually enslaved, or was instead running away from his inherited responsibilities as a Roman official, a common late Roman phenomenon called “curial flight.”

I’m not casting aspersions on the scholars who have questioned Patrick’s narrative - it’s pretty clear that my namesake was playing fast and loose with the facts in his writing - but there’s nothing implausible about the basic outline he gives us. Slave-trading across the Irish Sea had been going on for centuries, probably even before the Romans arrived in Britain. There were petty kings in eastern Ireland capable of assembling military forces large enough to grab hundreds or even thousands of captives at a time. And in this misty time somewhere between the 390s and the 430s, the Roman army that would have served as a powerful deterrent to large-scale raiding in northwest Britain was either crumbling or gone. Had he lived along Britain’s southeastern coast, Patrick might have been taken by Saxons across the North Sea to the Continent; had he lived in the northeast, he might have been taken north to present-day Scotland by Picts; had he lived in the southwest, he might have been taken by local British-speaking warlords. Because of where he lived, it was Irish raiders who got him. What Patrick experienced - being abducted and enslaved - was a more common experience in the Britain of his time than it had been in his father’s or grandfather’s.

Patrick had grown up with slaves. He tells us that his father’s estate - he calls it a villula, a little villa - housed both male and female slaves who were captured by the Irish along with him. Late Roman slavery had changed a bit since the time of Crixus, Eurysaces’ bakers, and little Abbas, but it was still slavery in every way that mattered. Patrick saw his enslavement as an unfortunate occurrence, a punishment for his and his neighbors’ sins, but there was nothing out of the ordinary about being enslaved. Slavery in Ireland functioned a bit differently than it did in other times and places: It was more akin to the general, and less intense unfreedom of later medieval serfdom, though it still operated on the principle of people as property, and Patrick draws no distinctions between the two. Not that his experiences gave Patrick any sort of fundamental opposition to slavery as an institution, even once he returned to Ireland on his mission of conversion: His Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus takes issue not with slave-raiding or slavery as a whole, but with the fact that Coroticus’s men were targeting Patrick’s Christian converts in Ireland. It was unseemly for Christians to enslave free Christians, and one gets the sense that Patrick was angriest of all that his authority and prestige were being damaged by Coroticus’s actions.

Yet slavery nevertheless had a profound impact on Patrick’s way of thinking about the world, and especially on his faith in God. Patrick was far from the only late Roman author to use slavery as a metaphor for the relationship between the human and the divine: The parable of the faithful servant, from the Gospel of Matthew, left a particularly outsize impression. For example, the Church father Saint Jerome writes of Paul, “the apostle, who was not a slave to sin, is rightly called the slave of God the Father and Christ.” Yet despite its commonality, the extent to which that metaphor dominates Patrick’s thinking is remarkable. He doesn’t just reach for the allusions to support his arguments; they effectively structure the way he tells his life story. Being led away into slavery parallels his journey from lacking faith - being a slave to sin, in Jerome’s terms - to becoming a dedicated servant of God.

We can read Patrick’s life in all sorts of different ways. He was clearly a complex figure for his contemporaries: His fellow bishops and Church officials weren’t altogether fond of him, hence the need for Patrick to write his Confessio as a form of self-defence. He’s even more complicated for us today, as we try to disentangle the real person—as well as historical fact—from the legend. But he was indeed a real person, one who sheds a great deal of light on both a dying world and how enslavement could shape a person’s life. In that, more than his missionary activity or his later fame, Patrick is unique in the ancient world.

Next time on Past Lives, we’re going to jump forward into the Middle Ages, but probably not to a place you’ve visited before: the shores of the Black Sea during the age of Mongol conquest, where a boy named Baybars watched his parents die before he was being sold into slavery. Through a twist of fate, Baybars became one of the most powerful people in the world: the ruler of Mamluk Egypt.

Until then, thanks so much for joining me, and I look forward to chatting with you again. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to our Patreon. It’s only 7 bucks a month, and you get access to tons of bonus content, like interviews with great scholars, Q&As with me, our book club, and much more. You can follow me on Instagram or on Bluesky.

Past Lives is written and narrated by me, Patrick Wyman. The producer is Morgan Jaffe. The music and sound design is by Gabriel Gould. The story editor is Rachel Kambury.

Subscribe to Past Lives and don’t forget to sign up for the Past Lives Patreon!

The coals of the little cookfire glowed white-hot in the dark night, illuminating a lump of clothing that had been left on the ground, abandoned by its previous owner. Crixus picked it up: a red cloak, the garb of a Roman soldier who was now either dead somewhere in the remains of this camp, or off running for his life. The woollen fabric served nicely as a rag to clean the blood from the edge of Crixus’s curved sword. Perhaps, he thought, some of that blood belonged to the man who had been wearing the cloak up until a few minutes ago.

Crixus and the other former slaves had fallen on the camp during the blackest part of the night. The moon peeked out only occasionally behind rolling veils of clouds, and few stars shone through. That helped give them the element of surprise. The Romans’ utter disbelief that a band of fugitives could do them any harm helped them even more.

Subscribe to Past Lives on your platform of choice, or listen here:

Crixus knew the Romans. He knew how they operated, and what they thought about people—slaves—like him. Not like him, he corrected himself: Crixus was a slave no longer, not since the day he, the Thracian Spartacus, and 70 others escaped from the gladiatorial school near Capua where they’d been imprisoned. He would never be a slave again. Death was preferable to the monotony of life in the ludus, with its frequent stings of the lash and the pain of the blade cutting his flesh. He had spent years fighting for the adulation of the crowd and the wealth of his master; now, Crixus fought for his own freedom.

The skills he’d learned in the arena served him well in battle. His body certainly remembered every single one: cut and thrust, block and parry, sidestep and strike. He would never forget them, could never forget them, not after all the countless hours of training he’d been subjected to, the copious sweat and blood spilled in the process. Crixus had been a fine gladiator, and received his fair share of ovations, but he considered this new work a far better use of his skills. It was certainly a better use of his time—what else would he do? Herd sheep? The thought was absurd.

It had been years since the concept of death bothered Crixus. A frisson of awareness of his own mortality came to him during this last fight, when the point of a Roman dagger slid along his cheek, leaving a thin, deep cut. Nevertheless, he was determined to live without any fear of death, especially in battle. Far better to die free, sword in hand, than nailed to a cross or on the sands of the arena.

Enslaved people did not become so willingly. From the moment they were taken to the moment they died, in ways both large and small, they resisted. Captives taken from battlefields and sacked cities might commit suicide rather than be forced into captivity, a last act of human defiance in the face of an inhumane fate. From ancient Athens to 19th-century South Carolina, enslaved people found ways to flout their circumstances, frustrate their masters, and maintain some semblance of human dignity. Masters who complained constantly about their slaves being too lazy or stupid to do what they were told were ignorant of the reality, which was that enslaved people knew how to use their masters’ unearned sense of superiority—and their ignorance of the work itself—against them. They saw no reason to work quickly, or do anything more than the bare minimum necessary to avoid retaliation. These were the techniques anthropologist James Scott famously called, “the weapons of the weak.” To wield these weapons, plausible deniability was essential; if they weren’t careful enough, or edged into outright disobedience, then violent punishment was the inevitable result.

Considering the conditions under which so many enslaved people experienced life over the millennia, the fact that there weren’t more large-scale rebellions does come as a surprise. When faced with conditions that oscillated between unpleasant and outright lethal, actively fighting against one’s oppressors would seem like a logical choice. Yet that observation fails to account for the care masters took in controlling their human property. Slaveowners were fundamentally aware of the fact that enslaved people did not want to be enslaved, and treated them accordingly. Close surveillance, the use of ropes and chains, and locking the enslaved in their quarters overnight were all standard “management” techniques. Other, less overt forms of control were often used, although they were no less violent: Masters might threaten to break up a troublesome slave’s family by selling one or more of its members, or reassign them to a particularly degrading or dangerous task. It was violence that kept enslaved people trapped in their circumstances: violence experienced in the past, violence witnessed in the present, and violence promised in the future. If we want to understand why enslaved people didn’t rebel more often, the primary reason lies in the continuous application of vicious, excessive force.

This makes the fact that on some rare occasions slaves did rebel, sometimes on an extraordinarily large scale, all the more remarkable. Between 1791 and 1804,, enslaved Haitians overthrew the sugar-planting elite and fought off French attempts to regain control of their native island in one of the only truly successful revolts in history. In the early years of the Protestant Reformation, downtrodden German peasants dreamt of a better world, and 100,000 of them would die for that dream when their lords retaliated. But the most famous revolt of all took place in the Roman world. It was led by a man whose legend survives to this day, told and retold in numerous books, movies, and TV shows: Spartacus. For two years, between 73 and 71 BC, tens of thousands of formerly enslaved people lived free in Italy, until the combined might of the Roman Republic and two of its most brilliant generals brought them back down to heel. Thousands of victims were captured and crucified along the road from Rome to Capua, where Spartacus’ rebellion began. Their bodies may be dust, but their actions have never been forgotten.

I mention Spartacus because in today’s episode, we’ll be focusing not on the legend himself, but on Crixus, one of his lieutenants. We only know a few hard facts about Crixus: He was a Gaul; he had been among the gladiators who escaped the training-school - ludus - in Capua; and he died commanding a portion of the rebel army before Spartacus and the others met their end. We have far more knowledge about the world in which Crixus lived and rebelled, which means the picture we draw of him in this episode will be informed by the events through which he lived, if not the exact events of his life. But he will be our guiding light through this episode as we try to understand one of the most indelible events in ancient history. Before we can get into the rebellion and Crixus himself, however, we need to acquaint ourselves with Roman Italy in the 70s BC, the world of Roman slavery, and the life of a gladiator.

The Roman world in Crixus’s time looked far different than it had in Terence’s nearly a century before. The process of Mediterranean conquest was over: Carthage had been destroyed, Roman officials governed territories from Iberia to Sicily to western Asia, and Rome itself had ballooned to just shy of a million inhabitants, the largest city in the world. But the Republic was not well: Two decades before the Spartacus Rebellion, in 91 BC, a massive rebellion of Rome’s Italian allies rocked the very foundation of the state. Formerly reliable friends who were fed up with the arrogant Roman elite who ran the state and frustrated by the uneven dispersals of the enormous spoils of empire spent four years battling it out for a better deal. In the end, they got it. Full Roman citizenship was extended widely throughout Italy, and the division between citizens and allies that had defined the Republic for 300 years came to an end.

But the Social War was just the beginning of Rome’s problems. The roots of them lay within the senatorial aristocracy that governed the city, the blue-blooded officials who competed with one another for elected offices, prestige, and plunder from military campaigns and governorships. Political murder, unthinkable within the Roman system for centuries, reappeared with a vengeance: The reforming brothers Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus were both assassinated by political opponents within the Senate, in 133 and 121 BC, respectively, after they attempted to introduce major land reforms. As the aristocrats got richer, the story goes, they used their vast wealth to buy up the farms of poor Roman citizens. Then, they turned those farms into huge plantations called latifundia, employing dozens or even hundreds of enslaved laborers to work the land, usually in awful conditions. The Gracchi brothers intended to place limits on landowning by the richest Romans and redistribute the excess land to Roman citizens.

These reforms were fairly mild, all things considered, but the Roman aristocracy responded with overwhelming violence. When I say “assassinated,” I mean that senators and their supporters beat Tiberius Gracchus to death with whatever blunt objects were at hand, killed Gaius (or forced him to commit suicide), and then executed anyone they could get their hands on. This kind of violence carried over into the Social War a few decades later, and then with still greater force during the civil wars between Marius and Sulla that threatened to rip apart the Roman state in the 80s and 70s BC. All of this was wrapping up in the years prior to Spartacus’s rebellion.

The issue of land—who owned it and how it was worked—is an important one in Crixus’s case, because it’s directly tied to the Spartacus rebellion. The story about rich Romans dispossessing the poor and turning their small farms into huge plantations isn’t borne out by the evidence; Italy was as full of small farmers in the 70s BC, as it had been a century or even two centuries before. What was real, however, were the latifundia that poured safe wealth into the pockets of Rome’s already-wealthy elite. Scholars argue about how many slaves there were in Italy at this time, and what percentage of the population they comprised: Safe estimates are 1-1.5 million, making up 20-25 percent of the population. Latifundia , and the slaves working them, were particularly dense in southern Italy and Sicily. Chain-gangs worked the fields and vineyards, enslaved drovers ran huge herds of cattle, and enslaved shepherds maintained the vast flocks of sheep whose wool clothed the Roman public. That meant there were dozens, even hundreds of brutalized workers on each individual plantation living out in the countryside, and dozens of plantations crammed into a single province. Sicily, for example, had hundreds of thousands of enslaved workers by the 130s BC, when the first major slave revolt in Roman history erupted. This was the First Servile War. In the three years it took to suppress it, tens of thousands of rebels across Sicily were killed, executed, or crucified en masse as a warning to others. The Romans learned nothing from this incident, and a Second Servile War broke out in Sicily 30 years later. It too took several years to end, lasting from 104 to 100 BC. Like the First, it cost thousands upon thousands of lives.

I’ve studied a lot of different elite groups over my years doing history, and I honestly think the equestrians and senators of the late Republic place first for collective and individual wealth. These men were orders of magnitude richer than their grandfathers had been, who had in turn been orders of magnitude richer than their grandfather; each aristocratic family was basically the equivalent of a large, diversified multinational corporation. They owned latifundia, smaller commercial farms, tasteful rural villas, lavish vacation homes on the Bay of Naples, herds of cattle and flocks of sheep, manufacturing facilities for pottery, and merchant shipping concerns. The equestrians, who weren’t active in political life, lacked the senatorial aristocracy’s aversion to the grubby business of money-making, and were often even wealthier and more diversified than their social and political superiors.

All of these businesses were effectively run by slaves on behalf of their owners, from the lowliest field-hand or shepherd up to the banking specialists, secretaries, managers, and advisors who often lived better than free Romans. Many of those at the bottom of enslaved life had little or no contact with any free people, much less their distant owners. Roman citizens, for their part, had no illusions about their dependence on their slaves, and the potential danger those vast numbers of brutalized people could pose. The orator Cicero tells us that the Roman aristocrat Domitius, governing Sicily after the Second Servile War, marveled at the size of a wild boar that had been hunted and killed. When he found out a slave had killed the boar, and told him he had used a spear for the deed, Domitius ordered the man to be crucified. “Domitius preferred cruelty in punishment rather than to seem lax by overlooking a crime.”

These were the foundations of Spartacus’s rebellion. Italy was simmering with discontent. The Italian allies, recently remade as citizens, hadn’t forgotten the bloody repression of their bid for better status. Two massive slave rebellions had left Roman owners fully aware of the risk presented by hundreds of thousands of enslaved people who were now unsupervised and isolated amongst themselves. Anecdotally, in my opinion, the Roman approach to slavery was never more brutal than at this time. The fabric of the Roman state had nearly ripped itself to pieces;.the time was ripe for the Italian countryside to once again explode in unrest and violence.

We know only three things about Crixus. He was a Gaul; he had been a gladiator at the same school as Spartacus; and he went on to lead a portion of the rebel army, dying in battle about a year before Spartacus himself famously met his end. Still, that’s enough for us to reconstruct a relief map of Crixus’s world, a starting point for the experiences that defined his life.

When our sources refer to Crixus as a Gaul - his name means “curly-haired” in the Gaulish language - that’s a pretty broad designation, an ethnic category that referred to people born everywhere from the Pyrenees to the North Sea to the Hungarian Plain. We sometimes call these people Celts; they’re the same term, with “Gaul” coming from Latin and “Celt” from Greek. There were Gauls living in what we now think of as Italy: The region between the Po River and the Alps was “Cisalpine Gaul,” though by Crixus’s time they were more likely to be found on the far side of the great mountains. Gauls could find their way to Roman slave-markets through both military campaigning and the more routine slave-trade that exchanged wine and fine pottery for human beings at ports like Massilia, today known as Marseille. That’s one possible origin story for Crixus: taken from his home in Gaul, then forced on a long walk or boat-trip down the Rhone, followed by either a short sail along the coast to Italy or a chained march along the French Riviera. Alternatively, he might have been hustled through the Alps from what’s now Switzerland or Austria, shivering in the cold as he trudged over through well-worn passes. He might even have been born to Gaulish parents in Italy. We simply don’t know.

What’s certain is that Crixus must have cut an imposing figure on the auction block, stripped down to a loincloth and presented for sale, degraded and dehumanized into a commodity, because he ended up at a gladiatorial school owned by Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Vatia, sometimes called Batiatus. The fact that one could be a trainer of gladiators by occupation and own a school dedicated to the craft gives some sense of the scale of the industry at this time: The Roman public were increasingly becoming connoisseurs of violence, with specific tastes in the bloodletting they packed into temporary arenas and stone amphitheatres to watch, while ambitious men footed the bill for the entertainment.

While we tend to think of gladiatorial games as to-the-death free-for-alls, that wasn’t actually the case. There were match officials and rules, like keeping one’s distance from a wounded opponent, and the editor - sponsor - of the games always determined whether the loser would survive. The gravestones of gladiators often indicate that they lost on numerous occasions, so losing a match wasn’t the death sentence Hollywood may have led us to believe. The content of the games varied, as well: Fights between wild beasts or between people and beasts were always a favorite. Gladiators could also be called upon to serve as entertaining executioners of war captives or criminals. Low-brow gladiatorial entertainment might involve a few hundred people crowded into an open marketplace to watch a starving bear tear apart a few condemned criminals; at the highest end, a would-be consul might empty his cash reserves to hire dozens of pairs of the best-trained gladiators in Italy for a production that would ensure the crowd never forgot its benefactor. In either case, the message to the viewers in the stands was always the same: No matter how far a Roman citizen might fall, no matter how destitute his financial situation or reputation, he would never be subjected to the humiliation of a public death. For a Roman, there was nothing more shameful, nothing more indicative of slave status, than dying in full sight of a jeering crowd.

Naturally, savvy entrepreneurs saw endless opportunity in this bloody marketplace. By the time Crixus was fighting in the arena, the industry was highly developed. Entrepreneurs like Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Vatia were operating at a substantial scale: Vatia had some 200 gladiators at his ludus, or gladiatorial school. The 60 pairs of gladiators hired for the funeral games of Publius Licinius Crassus in 183 BC, a previously unheard-of spectacle, would have seemed like a quaint offering for an elite Roman of Crixus’s time. By then, gladiators were everywhere in Roman life: serving as bodyguards for the wealthy, instructors in arms for the legions, thugs for hire when politicians needed muscle, and a constant source of anxiety among Roman civilians, who were keenly aware of the dangers the gladiators posed. These were brutalized men forced to brutalize others, outsiders enmeshed with Roman society, and they were stewing.

Archaeological investigations of Pompeii have unearthed gladiatorial schools just like Vatia’s: These were essentially fortified prisons designed to keep their occupants inside, away from polite Roman society. Guards watched the doors; bars and gates blocked potential exits; and punishments - lashings by the trainer, beatings for poor conduct or performance, and solitary confinement - kept the enslaved fighters in line.

Crixus and his comrades were a motley group: barbarians and outcasts from all over the Roman world and beyond, a mixture of Gauls, Thracians, Germans, and even down-on-their-luck Romans. They weren’t an army, and they weren’t soldiers, but they were all highly skilled warriors. They lifted heavy, wrestled and boxed, and practiced at length with wooden swords to train and strengthen their bodies. They treated injuries and wounds after fights and did it all over again the next day.

This was Crixus’s life: training, eating, fighting in front of thousands of people, and then returning to the ludus, where the gates would be locked behind him. Crixus and the others must have felt they had no chance of a better life, no shot at freedom or even a daily routine that didn’t consist of endless violence. That may have been why, at some point in 73 BC, something snapped inside the house of Batiatus. Crixus and his compatriots could no longer take it, and dozens of them decided together to break out. They did this despite knowing the likely consequences of their actions. Individual slaves ran away all the time, and those who returned by their own volition might get away with a beating or tattooing or branding; mass escape was a more serious issue, and it became even more serious when it boiled over into full-scale rebellion. The usual penalty for that was crucifixion, perhaps the most horrible way to die in the ancient world, and that only came after a period of the most extreme torture. Crixus, Spartacus, and the rest must have known this. The fact that they went ahead with their plan anyway speaks volumes about the conditions of their lives as gladiators.

Consider, for a moment, what that decision also says about Crixus and his compatriots. Romans knew their slaves didn’t want to be slaves, and the whole framework of the system that enslaved them was designed to avoid a revolt. Positive inducements - freedom, better food, the chance to marry - served as the proverbial carrot dangling from the end of a very literal and painful stick. By 73 BC, the system of subjugation that enslaved men like Crixus and Spartacus had developed weak points they could exploit.. How? Why? Was Vatia a particularly brutal master? Did the memory of the massive Sicilian rebellions get passed around between enslaved people in whispers, quietly brewing collective action? Was it the fact that these gladiators were all people who had come from outside Roman society, had no ties to its civic structure, and little hope of gaining citizenship? Or was it that they were trained killers who knew how to fight and weren’t afraid of death, a potent combination that drove them to take the ultimate step? These were real people, and fear of death and injury are powerful disincentives to action. Those fears weren’t enough to stop Crixus, Spartacus, and the others from inciting full-fledged rebellion.

Crixus seems to have been one of the leaders of the rebel band from the beginning, right alongside Spartacus. More than 200 men planned their escape; somewhere between 70 and 78 got away from thethe house of Vatia in 73 BC. They immediately seized a convoy of proper weapons - gladiators’ weapons, ironically - bound for another city. Now armed, they headed south toward Mount Vesuvius, about 20 miles away from Capua, where they could set up a temporary community and try to make new lives as free people. Here their story diverges from most mass escapes: Instead of being felled by the first group of soldiers sent from Capua to apprehend them, Crixus, Spartacus, and the others inflicted a stinging defeat on their pursuers. It would be the first rebel victory of many, the flashpoint of a mass uprising that soon engulfed much of southern Italy. Remember, this was the heartland of mass enslavement in the Roman world: The region was full of latifundia, with their grim barracks and brutal working conditions, which Crixus and the other gladiators would have seen time and again as they went to their next bout. Thousands of enslaved were inspired enough, and desperate enough, to risk the same punishment that Crixus and the other gladiators had by setting out, choosing to run away en masse to join the rebels atVesuvius. There, the swelling rebel army defeated the praetor Gaius Claudius Glaber and a few thousand men sent to apprehend them, further fueling the fires of rebellion. Over the rest of 73 BC, Shepherds and drovers from the distant countryside poured into what had become a city of the formerly enslaved. Had Crixus ever envisioned such a thing?

It was probably around this time that Crixus’s vision of the rebellion diverged from that of Spartacus, his more famous colleague. Crixus wanted to directly attack the Roman forces that were stalking them throughout Italy, armies far more daunting than the militia and part-timers they had previously defeated. Spartacus, by contrast, wanted to get the rebels out of Italy entirely, and as quickly as possible. After several more victories and plundering portions of southern Italy, Crixus took a large group - perhaps 10,000 people - to Gargano, near the heel of Italy’s boot. There he and his followers ran into a full consular army, roughly 10,000 fully trained and equipped men. After a hard fight, the army cut Crixus and his compatriots to pieces. They died bravely, we’re told, but they died nonetheless.

Modern accounts tend to contrast Crixus’s recklessness with Spartacus’s careful planning. I don’t think we have enough information to be able to say that conclusively. It would be more accurate to say that these were poorly equipped people who had little military training aside from whatever Spartacus, Crixus, and the other ex-gladiators and former soldiers among them had been able to impart in a relatively short amount of time. Their triumph wasn’t their victories over Glaber and the others; it was the fact that they escaped slavery on the latifundia or in the ludus at all, and lived free for a time before the Romans reclaimed them in death. Spartacus himself wouldn’t live to see victory: Like Crixus, he too died in battle, and 6,000 survivors were crucified along the road from Capua to Rome just a year later.

But death was still a year away when Spartacus received news of Crixus’s defeat. To honor his fellow rebel and mark his funeral celebrations, Spartacus forced 300 Roman prisoners to fight to the death. It’s not difficult to imagine what Spartacus was thinking. How many times had Crixus been forced to fight for the benefit and entertainment of others? How much of his own blood had he spilled to please the crowd? How many men had Crixus been forced to kill at the command of a rich sponsor who would never know the grit of the sand or the pain of the lash? To me, this moment - not the final defeat or the mass crucifixion - marks the real flashpoint of the rebellion, the beating heart of its purpose. In death, Crixus got the exact kind of send-off that he himself had provided in the arena, inverting the very system that had made him who he was. In the end, Crixus died a free man, sword in hand. He was celebrated, honored, and remembered, not as a disposable piece of property fit only to die for the entertainment of the crowd, but as a leader and warrior. Spartacus’s name rings out through the millennia, but there were thousands upon thousands of others who shared his burning desire for freedom, Crixus not least among them.

Next time on Past Lives, we’ll continue with our focus on Rome, but move from the gladiatorial school to even more lethal surroundings: an industrial bakery, one of the bleakest places in the Roman world.

Subscribe to Past Lives and don’t forget to sign up for the Past Lives Patreon!

This will be my first Christmas without my dad.

He died on a beautiful Tuesday morning in May. The sun was shining in through the open curtains of his bedroom. I remember the shadows from the tree limbs just outside the windows, little patches of darkness cutting across the bright light, moving ever so slightly as the branches swayed in a gentle breeze. On his nightstand was a book I’d bought for him: Henry V, written by my dear friend (and one of my Dad’s favorite writers), Dan Jones. His glasses were neatly folded on top of the book, ready for the next time he picked them up.

He never did pick them, of course. He didn’t finish the book, and he was in such rough shape beforehand that I don’t know how much of it stuck. But he was never going to quit reading, right up until the end. It was his routine: Every night, without fail, my dad laid down in bed and read for about half an hour. He did this for as long as I can remember, back to my earliest childhood, and the books were almost always history.

Dad might dabble in the occasional bit of fiction, especially when he and my mom were on one of their many long road trips and needed an audiobook, but history was his one true love. I don’t know how long he did this before my memory kicked in, but I can’t remember a time when there wasn’t a popular history title or biography sitting on that nightstand next to his glasses. He must have read hundreds of books over the years, ranging from the many excellent Oxford Histories of the United States to biographies of Churchill and Kit Carson to Mary Beard’s SPQR.

It’s not hard to imagine the effect that had on me. Reading history books was what he did, so it became what I did. He loved going to Powell’s City of Books in Portland, and I could go with him to pick out a reasonably priced used book on generals of the Civil War or the Flying Tigers and Claire Chennault or Lewis and Clark. We could always talk about history, any kind of history, because he had always read something about any topic that might come up.

Looking back at it now, I can’t tell how much of my enthusiasm for history was a product of wanting to have something to talk about with my dad, and how much of it was my own interests pulling me in that direction. They’re not separable in any meaningful way: The desire to make ourselves into a person our parents can be proud of gets wired in so deeply that pinpointing where their influence stops and our desires and needs begin isn’t really possible. For that matter, I don’t know how much of my dad’s history-reading habits were driven by his need for structure and routine - he found something that worked to get him to sleep every night and he stuck with it - and how much was his genuine love for the subject matter. Again, they’re not really separable. I’d guess that history was, on some level, comforting for him.

I don’t remember telling my dad I wanted to be a historian. There’s no specific moment I can recall when we had a conversation about what history meant to us, why it was important to study it, or what kind of career I might have in the field. It’s odd now, considering just how much time we spent reading and talking about history, that we never had a come-to-Jesus discussion of the topic as a whole. Maybe we did, and I’ve just forgotten it. There were a few great years before he got sick where he and I were playing a lot of golf and having a few too many frosty beverages, with him smoking Kool Mild 100s and pretending I wasn’t sneaking off to have a cigarette myself. We talked incessantly about baseball and history while we rattled around from one mediocre shot to the next. There were probably some profound moments in there, and I don’t remember them.

I do remember us getting a little bit too drunk at a bar on the Oregon coast, and walking into a stop sign on the way back to our motel while he laughed around the Kool jammed in his mouth. He had a great laugh, but you had to work to get it. People who didn’t know him well thought he was a little dour, perhaps even curmudgeonly, as many disciplinarian school principals are. He wasn’t: He appreciated the sight of a 23-year-old fool running face-first into an obvious pole as much as anyone I’ve ever seen. While I don’t recall our conversations about history in any detail, I’ll keep that laugh forever.

When we got back to that motel, he got out his book, laid down in bed, and read, just like he always did. I think it was Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought, one of the best of the Oxford Histories of the US.

Dad’s tastes were specific. The book had to have a great story. It had to be competently written. It couldn’t go too hard into the academic aspects of a topic; that was the author’s job, to do the underlying work and communicate it without overwhelming a non-specialist with minutiae that detracted from the narrative. That was his problem with Mary Beard’s SPQR: too much detail, not enough story. We disagreed on that; SPQR is one of my favorite books, a masterpiece of popular history. As I told him at the time, he was allowed to be wrong about it.

SPQR is one of the many books I bought for my dad. He was extraordinarily easy to shop for: You just had to find a good popular history that matched his interests, which could be anything from the Plantagenets to the Comanches to Omar Bradley. As Christmas approaches, this first Christmas without him, I realize now just how much I miss picking out that book for him, knowing that some little piece of our relationship was on that nightstand with him for weeks at a time. It was something we shared, something between the two of us, and now it’s gone.

Losing one of the most important and formative people in your life makes you ask yourself all sorts of questions. Who am I? What do I want out of life? Why am I like this? Who will I be without the person whose influence shaped me in the most profound ways?

After seven months, I don’t know the answer to any of those questions. They’re not the kinds of questions you ask and answer once, for that matter. They present themselves over and over again, often when you’re least expecting them to rear their heads: while you’re watching your own son melt down over a homework assignment; when a stab of guilt reminds you that you haven’t looked for a book for someone who’s no longer there to receive it; and in those quiet moments, late at night or early in the morning, when the sadness and the grief creep in, and it’s just you, the loss, and your memories, pulling on your sense of self until anxiety overwhelms or peace sets in.

I felt all that very strongly a couple of weeks ago, as I was editing the draft of my new book, Lost Worlds, for the last time. The process of writing that book is inextricably bound up with my memories of my dad at the end of his life. Drafts of early chapters came together while he was still well enough to read them and offer his feedback: more story, less extraneous detail, as always. It was good advice the first dozen times he gave it, and remained words to live by. By the end, he no longer had the energy to read. I’ll never know what he thought of the finished product, whether it did indeed have enough story to satisfy the most discerning reader of the genre I’ve ever known.

That’s one of death’s more minor tragedies: the not knowing, the never being able to ask, the reality that what you have now is all there will ever be. Sometimes, as I’m writing, I hear my dad’s voice in my head, clear as day: “Nobody needs to hear that part, Pat. If you know the reader’s gonna skip it, why would you write it?” Or: “Just do it right the first time, and you won’t have to go back and do it again.”

Those are good words. They don’t answer the questions I have about myself, questions raised by his absence, but they’re not a bad place to start: by doing the job, a job I know he appreciated, and doing it well. I’m glad when they pop up, and I cherish the echo of his voice, like a lifeline that ties us back to those conversations in his truck on the way to the garbage dump, or the time we drove from Portland to LA and documented the trip by taking pictures only at freeway rest stops.

I miss how much he loved Felix Hernandez and Damian Lillard and Shaun Alexander. I miss the satisfaction he got when someone complimented his omnipresent pair of Nike AirMax sneakers; nobody expects a 73-year-old man to appreciate fresh kicks like that. I miss the way he threw the rope over the bed of the truck when he was tying down a load. But most of all, I miss seeing him with a book in his hand, and that little spark he got on his face when he knew I was going to ask him what he thought about it.

For half a decade, I tried to get my dad to do an interview with me on his taste in popular history: what he thought made good and bad books, which ones were his favorites, what got him into the genre, that sort of thing. He never had the slightest interest in it. Nobody wanted to hear him talk, he said; what did he have to offer? No, I replied, he knew a ton about the topic, and he had genuinely great taste. People would enjoy hearing it. I probably asked him five times, once a year, and he never wavered, not even as he got sicker and sicker and the end was obviously drawing near.

What I really meant was that I wanted to hear him talk about those things in a form that would preserve it for posterity. Maybe if I’d put it that way, he would have agreed; more likely, it wouldn’t have changed anything. He was a stubborn guy, maybe the most stubborn I’ve ever known. Once he made up his mind, it wasn’t shifting. I think he saw doing that interview as giving up, as admitting that he wouldn’t be around forever to keep reading. There would always be another book, another story. Then, one day in May, there wasn’t. Now it’s Christmas, and there’s no book waiting for him under the tree. There will never be another.

But he’s still here. He’s on this page now, and he’s on every page I’ll ever write, because who I am and what I do can’t be separated from the way he shaped me. His voice will always be there, asking, questioning, critiquing, reminding me not to half-ass something that requires a full ass, telling me to just do the part I don’t want to do because it’s not going anywhere. I hope I can still hear that voice as clearly in the future as I do now, as strongly as if he were standing right here next to me. I believe I will.

Subscribers to the Past Lives Patreon have access to an audio version of this essay, along with tons of other great bonus content.

Be sure to subscribe to Past Lives on your podcast platform of choice. If you’d like to support the show, please join our Patreon, where you’ll find a bunch of bonus content, including interviews, sources discussions, and much more.

Neaira’s cane tapped on the paving stones as she walked. Nearly sixty, her pace was slower than it used to be, but she was still brisk enough to leave her two aging maids struggling to keep up. The two women, Thratta and Coccalinê, had been with Neaira for more than thirty years. They were her confidants and her closest friends. They were also her slaves, though they wore that status lightly these days.

Stephanus, Neaira’s Athenian man, had joked that it cost more to keep them than they were worth. That wasn’t funny, Neaira snapped at him. Thratta and Coccalinê had gone with her to Megara, they had come back with her to Athens, and they had stuck with her through the very worst of times. She would never see them parted from her. If they were freed, where would they go? How would they care for themselves? Thratta and Coccalinê’s days in the ergasterion were long since over.

The ergasterion. Neaira disdained that word, looked down on it as if it lay at the bottom of a deep well of bitterness. These days, when she heard ergasterion, it referred to the cobblers’ shops Stephanus owned, or the noisy shield-factory between their city house and the agora, the market—not the establishment in which she had spent her youth. The shops sold shoes and armor; her ergasterion had sold her body. She had called herself a hetaira, a courtesan, but there were other, meaner ways to describe her work.

Most days, Neaira tried not to think about any of it. Those years in Nikarete’s house, back in Corinth, were long past. Thank all the gods for that. Neaira certainly did—she made offerings regularly to a number of different deities, seeking them out in their rich temples and sacrificing in return for what they’d given her. Her mind turned to one of her of her acquaintances, a friend and fellow former hetaira. The other woman was immortalized in bronze, a statue of her residing at the sanctuary of Delphi. It stood between statues of King Philip of Macedonia and Archidamos of Sparta.

Neaira wasn’t in the market for a statue at Delphi; right now, she was searching for fine painted pottery, something to replace the piece Antidorides had broken a few days before. The boy - not a boy, she reminded herself, a full-grown man - had dropped the red krater, the mixing-vase, when his foot slipped. Antidorides was the finest runner she had ever seen, and she had seen some great ones at Olympia and Nemea. Even so, he was so clumsy around the house.
Thoughts of Antidorides and her other children made Neaira smile. They were Stephanus’s, but she had been in their lives for some 30 years, since just after their mother died. That had been the end of Neaira’s first life as a hetaira and the beginning of her second. She lived a free life now, but that’s not to say it was an easy one; it certainly wasn’t as intellectually stimulating as it used to be. But there was no question which she preferred. The problem was, her past refused to stay there. When the fool Apollodorus filed his lawsuit against her, that past reemerged with a vengeance.

Prostitution was everywhere in ancient Greece. The first time we hear the word porne, the standard term for a prostitute throughout the Greek-language corpus, is in the earliest poetry outside the works of Homer, dating back to the 8th century BC. In fact, there are more than 200 different Greek words for different kinds of sex workers: male and female, enslaved and free, adults and children, high-end companions and streetwalkers. Some of these people chose their line of work; many, probably by a considerable margin, did not. Literary types waxed rhapsodic about beautiful, educated hetairai, the sophisticated courtesans who graced the elite drinking parties of Athens with their presence. The cruel wit of the early poet Archilochus saw it rather differently: “Just as a Thracian or Phrygian man sucks barley beer through a straw, she was bent over, toiling.” Ancient Greeks saw nothing wrong with paying for sex, but that doesn’t mean they celebrated those who provided it. While the language we use to refer to sex workers has changed over the millennia, the way they are treated has not: In Ancient Greece, sex workers were marginalized, excluded from polite society, mocked, degraded, and looked down upon by those very same men who had hetairai at their elegant symposia or thought nothing of visiting a brothel.

Sex work is a complex and thorny topic, which is why I’ve mostly shied away from talking about it in my decade of history podcasting: I was afraid that I would say the wrong thing, and in the process fail in my obligations to the past people I’m trying to bring to light. What’s clear to me now, however, is that it’s an absolutely essential topic. Sex work is work, and has to be understood as a meaningful economic activity that involves physical labor, just like mining, craft production, or mercenary soldiering. But it’s also so much more than that. Sex work speaks to sexual and social mores as well as concepts around things like gender and sexuality. These are defining aspects of any society, and they require exploration and explanation. Anxieties about masculinity and femininity and the fragility of the social order show themselves with extraordinary clarity in the context of sex work. Who provides it, who can access it, and what the provision and consumption (up to and including abuse) of those services says about the participants are all open questions whose answers vary, depending on when and where we look. Because prostitution was omnipresent in ancient Greece, and they talked and wrote about it so much, we can come up with strong answers to all of those questions. More importantly, we can highlight the experiences of some of the people who were sex workers in this time and learn how it impacted their lives.

Athens was a democracy, one of the most comprehensive in the ancient world, where even comparatively humble farmers and shopkeepers had a political voice so long as they held citizenship. Most of the people living in Athens and its environs, called Attica, weren’t citizens: They included resident foreigners, called metics, along with vast numbers of enslaved people - tens of thousands of them - whose labor made Athens run. But within this so-called
“comprehensive” democracy was one notable exception: There were no female citizens with actual political rights, and no potential pathway to achieving them. Wealthy foreign residents and former slaves had a small, nearly nonexistent chance of becoming citizens so long as they were men. Citizenship, despite its relative breadth, was still guarded with extraordinary jealousy in Athens. To falsely claim to be a citizen was a serious offense, one that carried major penalties. Accusing someone of such an act inevitably led to legal proceedings in open court. That’s how we know a woman named Neaira, the subject of today’s episode, existed.

The Athenians were fond of public speeches. Because they had to persuade large bodies of their fellow citizens - members of the voting Assembly or jurors in the law courts - oration became one of the defining features of political life. Luckily for us in the present, a great many of those speeches survive, copied and recopied in scrolls and manuscripts down the centuries, hidden on the dusty shelves of monastery libraries until scholars found them. One of these orations, attributed to (but probably not written by) fourth-century-BC Athenian statesman Demosthenes, is entitled Against Neaira.

We’ll talk more about the specifics later, but the gist of the incident is this: Neaira, a former hetaira, was sued by Apollodorus for illegally marrying an Athenian citizen and passing off the daughter they had together as a citizen. That by itself is fascinating material for us to work with, but what makes Against Neaira such an extraordinary text is that the author of the oration goes into great detail about Neaira’s background. She is one of the very few sex workers in ancient Greece for whom we have such a complete life history. Even though it comes from a profoundly hostile source - the purpose of the oration was to convince the jury of Neaira’s wrongdoing - the information it contains is unique. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Against Neaira is the single most important historical source we have from ancient Greece regarding prostitution specifically and gender norms and relations more generally. Before we can start to unpack Neaira’s fascinating life story, however, we need to try to understand the broader context of sex work in classical Athens.

Old scholarship on prostitution in ancient Greece made a hard distinction between pornai, the generic term for sex workers, and hetairai, the courtesans who enlivened the elegant drinking parties, or symposia, with their wit, grace, and physical beauty. This distinction is partially a result of modern biases, in particular the long-lasting influence of Victorian prudishness on our understanding of the Greeks. Victorians were a squeamish bunch by our standards, and even those who fully grasped the comparatively deviant world of ancient Greek sexuality were inclined to speak about it in euphemisms and half-truths. This unhelpful distinction between pornai and hetairai is also a product of the period sources we have at our disposal. The vast majority of those sources were written by elite men for other elite men. Their writings reflect their world, its viewpoints and its blind spots, not the real world that surrounded them, the world in which people like Neaira lived and worked. Those texts were then filtered through centuries of copying, almost entirely in monastery libraries, where the monks had their own well-documented hang-ups about sex; this informed what the monks decided to copy or not copy from a crumbling, centuries-old manuscript onto fresh parchment. As a result, our portrait of ancient Greek sex and prostitution is warped in ways that make it hard to see the forest for the trees. We have a comparative wealth of information about high-end hetairai; but our understanding of the lives of humbler sex workers is much narrower.

What we can say with clarity and certainty is that sex work was everywhere in ancient Greece. For ancient Greek men, absent from the definition of adultery were interactions with sex workers. I already mentioned the sheer variety of terms, more than 200 of them, ancient Greeks used for different kinds of sex workers. Much like the old adage about the Inuit and their cornucopia of terms for snow and ice, you only need so many if there’s a commensurate number of real-world applications that require definition. The third-century BC Greek writer Aristophanes of Byzantium saw so much variation in terms, and so much confusion about them, that he felt the need to write a detailed study of the topic, entitled On Insults. The standard words were porne and pornos, referring to a woman or man for sale, respectively: This is the origin of our term “pornography.” Hetaira referred euphemistically to a high-end companion. Auletris - flute player - and orchestris, dancer, were likewise euphemisms, while chamaitupe, “ground-beater,” was our equivalent of “streetwalker.” Neaira would have heard all of these terms and more besides in her lifetime.

Male sex workers were less common in this world, but they did exist: The Athenian playwright Aristophanes - a different Aristophanes from the one I just mentioned - discusses an old woman hiring a young man to provide sexual services. For men who engaged in prostitution, the price was steep: The terms generally fall into the category of impurity, like akathartos, “unclean,” or imply the loss of one’s masculinity. The classicist Konstantinos Kapparis sums this up succinctly, so I’ll quote him at length: “Unlike the female prostitute, who is easily available and accessible to everyone but does not have control over her body, the male prostitute does have control over his body and his fate and chooses to relinquish this control and make his body, youth, and good looks available to anyone who wants to buy it. In the case of the female prostitute the invective focuses on easy access, but in the case of the male prostitute the focus is on his choice to sell himself.” Along those lines, there was no term for a brothel with male prostitutes, nor was male prostitution considered work in the same way it was for women. Female sex workers, however, labored in an ergasterion, a “workshop,” just like cobblers and other physical laborers, doing what they had to do to survive.

Despite their ubiquity, however, attitudes toward sex workers were not positive at any time in ancient Greek history, and they became blatantly negative as time went on. The early Athenian playwrights found immense humor - cruel, demeaning, abusive humor that made light of serious trauma - in prostitution: Their vocabulary is inventive, such as the term lakkoproktos, “ditch-ass,” a compound of the words for “deep ditch” and “anus.” An old Athenian comic might call a sex worker a kreagra, or “meat catcher,” or radia, “easy.” As time went on, into the Hellenistic and Roman periods, the humor disappeared, replaced by an increasing emphasis on filth, uncleanliness, and degradation. Those elements were always present, though, and they shaped Neaira’s life from beginning to end.

Now with some crucial background in place, we can turn to Neaira and what we know of her life. Unlike the first two individuals we encountered on Past Lives, Nanaya’ila’i and Sosias, whose scant historical footprints had to be squeezed of every ounce of detail from the tiniest bits of evidence, a lot was been written about Neaira. This presents an even thornier problem, however, because those writings come from a hostile context. Everything we know about Neaira derives from that oration, Against Neaira, delivered in an Athenian court sometime in the 340s BC. What can we trust from this account?

Scholars have spent a lot of time and energy debating this question, because Against Neaira is so central to our understanding of both prostitution and women’s lives in ancient Greece. Here are the fundamentals of the case that produced the oration: A man named Theomnestus brought the suit against Neaira, then over 50 years old, on behalf of his father-in-law, Apollodorus. Theomnestus and Apollodorus claimed Neaira had misrepresented herself as an Athenian citizen, and that her daughter, Phano, who had married an aristocratic Athenian citizen, likewise didn’t have that status. The background is complex: Neaira was the concubine of a prominent Athenian named Stephanus, who had a long and contentious history with Apollodorus, the man who brought the suit. We have to bear in mind that the purpose of the lawsuit and the oration was to persuade a jury of ancient Greek men, not to give us in the present a sustained, accurate narrative of Neaira’s life. The biographical sketch Apollodorus gives us was intended to make Neaira look bad to an audience of Athenian citizens, to play on their anxieties about the thin line between citizenship and slavery, and not least the dangers of independent women.

With that said, Apollodorus must have told a life story for Neaira that would have rung true to that audience. Remember, these Athenian men were all familiar with sex work in its various manifestations. Many in the audience would have known Stephanus, or known of him, and told other members of the jury if Apollodorus was outright lying. It’s possible some of the men on that jury were familiar with Neaira personally. We don’t have to believe the accusations Apollodorus hurls at Neaira, like the callous assertion that she pimped out her daughter, Phano, while claiming the girl was a citizen. We can feel reasonably confident that the basic outline of Neaira’s life story, if not the slanderous details Apollodorus provides, is accurate.

The story of Neaira’s life begins not in Athens, but in Corinth, one of the largest, wealthiest, and most populous Greek cities in this period. Corinth in the 390s or 380s BC was famous for its high-end sex industry, and one of its major players was a woman named Nikarete. Nikarete had been enslaved at one time, but was eventually freed by her master; she then went into business on her own, probably with her former master’s financial and logistical support. She was a pornoboskousa, a procurer or keeper of pornai. Her job was to purchase young, desirable girls before they reached maturity - paidiskai - and teach them what they needed to know about their trade. She would present these children as her own daughters to her clients, men who were established among the famous, wealthy, and powerful not just in Corinth, but across Greece: Against Neaira tells us that orators, poets, and actors all sought out Nikarete’s establishment and engaged the services of her enslaved workers. Apollodorus expected the audience of his oration to be familiar with this business model, if not Nikarete specifically, though she seems to have had quite a reputation.

Neaira was one of the girls Nikarete bought, probably sometime between 390 and 380 BC. The details of her early years, which Apollodorus presents as a shameful, degrading past that ought to disqualify Neaira from living an honorable life, read as extraordinarily harrowing to us today. We don’t know anything about Neaira’s background before Nikarete purchased her: Archaeological evidence tells us that many women working in brothels came from points east, and that may have been true of Neaira as well. What we can say with certainty is that she was a child. According to Apollodorus, who may or may not have been exaggerating for effect, Nikarete had put Neaira to work before she reached puberty. This was young by ancient Greek standards, but far from unheard of. Nobody questioned the fact that pubescent girls and boys were readily available as sexual fodder for adult men.

For perhaps a decade, this would have been Neaira’s life: being treated as an expensive rental by some of the wealthier, more powerful men in Greece. She was a hetaira, courtesans who accompanied men to symposia, wine-guzzling parties where discussions of philosophy, law, and history took place, conversations that defined the intellectual life of ancient Greece. We know that Neaira traveled widely. The famous Athenian orator Lysias was fond of another of Nikarete’s enslaved hetaira, Metaneira, and arranged for her and Neaira to accompany him to Eleusis for initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries, an ancient and prestigious religious cult. She may also have been to the Peloponnese, Thessaly, and even the Greek cities of Ionia on the coast of Asia. Not many free women had that kind of exposure to the world.

As she aged out of the paidiskai category of child sex slaves, Neaira’s value to Nikarete decreased; there would be new girls, bought and brought up as Neaira had been, to take her place. Nothing about Nikarete suggests that she was sentimental about her workers, or even that she sympathized with the difficulties of their lives: After all, she had probably experienced much the same, and exploiting that same business model was her way out of that life. Nikarete’s niche in the market was built on the youth and feigned respectability of the enslaved children she called her daughters.

To others, however, Neaira’s value was extraordinary. Two men, Eukrates and Timanoridas, bought her from Nikarete for the high price of 30 minae of silver. That’s about half a talent, the price the Athenian Nikias had paid for the mining overseer Sosias half a century or more earlier. We know from our episode on Sosias that ancient Greeks judged the monetary worth of enslaved people keenly; there’s no reason to assume Eukrates and Timanoridas were besotted when they decided to pay 30 minae, though whether they employed her as Nikarete had done or retained her services for themselves is unknown. When the two men married their wives three years later, they agreed to allow Neaira to buy her freedom. She paid 20 minae, sourced from earnings she’d been allowed to keep and a combination of gifts and loans from former clients. Whether her lower sale price was a gift from Eukrates and Timanoridas or reflected the lower monetary value of a sex worker as she aged, we cannot say.

One of the conditions of Neaira buying her freedom was her agreement to no longer work in her former profession in Corinth. Phrynion, one of her former clients, brought her with him to Athens around 373 BC. Against Neaira describes Neaira’s life with him in this manner: “he [Phrynion] treated her in an outrageous and reckless way; he took her to dinner with him everywhere, wherever he was drinking, she joined in all his carousals, and he had intercourse with her in public whenever and wherever he pleased, making a display of his privilege in front of onlookers.” On one occasion, however, Neaira accompanied him to a raucous party given by the Athenian general Chabrias. There, according to Apollodorus, guests and even the host’s own slaves sexually assaulted her. Apollodorus treats this as evidence of her debauchery and degradation; it’s far more likely she was raped. Sex workers today, like all women, are constantly at risk of sexual violence, and the past was no different. Neaira’s experience at Chabrias’s party was probably far more common than the textual record tells us. The fact that she operated among the elite in both Corinth and Athens offered Neaira no protection, nor did her dearly purchased freedom. In the aftermath of this incident, Neaira decamped for the city of Megara with two maids - Thratta and Coccalinê - and her jewelry.

Neaira’s circumstances improved in Megara: It was there she met Stephanus, who brought her back to Athens with him. Apollodorus claims that Neaira had three children at this point, but this is a baseless attack: the children were Stephanus’s legitimate offspring, two boys and a girl. Once she had returned to Athens, Phrynion tried to take Neaira back from Stephanus. The matter went to arbitration, and the arbitrators made it clear that Neaira was both legally free and outside any man’s direct supervision, a status and a privilege practically no women in Athens enjoyed. At the same time, however, the arbitrators agreed that Neaira would have to divide her time between Phrynion and Stephanus. Her freedom only went so far.

We hear no more about Phrynion after that point. Presumably Neaira went to live with Stephanus for the ensuing decades between then and the lawsuit in the 340s BC. He claimed that he didn’t marry her, and kept her as a concubine; Stephanus’s three children were his by his previous wife, an Athenian-born woman. We cannot say what any of these relationships were really like: whether the children, who had probably known Neaira since their early years, saw her as a surrogate mother; whether Neaira and Stephanus were living happily ever after, or with an eye to the simple management of their lives; or whether they did in fact consider themselves married, albeit not legally. Stephanus was a reasonably prominent man. He could never marry a former hetaira, and certainly not have children by her. By the time of the case, when she must have been well into her 50s, Neaira’s options for a different life were nonexistent, even if she had wanted to leave Stephanus. There were power dynamics at play in her life as a free woman, no less than when she had been an enslaved sex worker. By then, Neaira had probably spent more than half her life as a free woman; her days in Nikarete’s brothel were far in the past. But Apollodorus could still bring those memories to the fore and weaponize them against her. The result of the lawsuit is sadly unknown, but we can hope the jury saw through Apollodorus’s attacks as easily as we can 2300 years later.

Neaira’s life ought to neutralize any remaining myths about the glamor of high-end hetairai in classical Athens. Women like Neaira were an intimate part of a world of intellectual sophistication and cultural production. A generation before, hetairai had talked philosophy with Socrates; hetairai would accompany Alexander the Great and his generals on their rampage across Asia in the coming decades. Neaira herself rubbed shoulders with some of the greatest orators, philosophers, and soldiers of her day. But the context of those experiences—the facts of these women’s lives—cannot be ignored, or placed on some other contextual level separate from reality in order to assuage our modern sensibilities. Neaira and countless women like her were trafficked, sexually assaulted, abused, and forced into long-term relationships in order to survive a world that was deeply hostile to them. Neaira was extraordinary in that she occupied the very highest and most visible echelons of an industry whose workers typically toiled and suffered in anonymity. All of their lives were intrinsically woven into the tapestry of life in ancient Greece, no less so than Socrates, Alexander the Great, or Apollodorus. Ultimately, we ought to take some satisfaction in knowing that it’s Neaira, not Apollodorus, whose name we’re more likely to carry with us.

Past Lives is written and narrated by me, Patrick Wyman. The producer is Morgan Jaffe. The sound designer is Gabriel Gould. The story editor is Rachel Kambury.

Be sure to subscribe to Past Lives on your podcast platform of choice. If you’d like to support the show, please join our Patreon, where you’ll find a bunch of bonus content, including interviews, sources discussions, and much more.

Everyone who subscribes on the Past Lives Patreon will receive the text of every episode sent straight to their inbox at the same time as the audio drops on the podcast feed, so be sure to head over and smash that button. It’s only $7 per month, and you get access to tons of bonus interviews, videos, bibliographies, Q&As, and much more - if you’ve enjoyed my writing here over the years, or Tides of History, I can promise you’ll enjoy this as well.

For those who prefer to listen, you can find the Past Lives RSS feed here, subscribe on Apple Podcasts, or subscribe on Spotify. I hope you’ll check it out: Past Lives is the show I’ve been dreaming of making since I was in graduate school, and I couldn’t possibly be more excited to go independent and do some cool stuff.

Also, how cool is this art?!?

!

If you lived a hundred years ago, who would you have been? What about a thousand years ago? Ten thousand?

I can promise you this much: You - yes, you - wouldn’t have been someone you’ve heard of before.

The stories we tell about the past revolve around towering figures like Alexander the Great and Napoleon and Cleopatra, individuals whose myths have their own centers of gravity. When we’re taught history in school, it’s largely through the lives and experiences of these people who, we’re told, are significant. Important. We learn to memorize their names and the dates of battles, coronations, and other key events associated with them.

Now, don’t get me wrong: We can learn a lot about the past from these people—who they were and what they did. This is what historical figureheads are for. But they’re not you. You listening to this might be rich, famous, and powerful, but statistically, you’re probably not. And there’s nothing wrong with that! Most of us aren’t. But we—you, me, people like us—are the raw material of history, the stuff history is made of. We always have been.

Most of us actually have a king or queen or two decorating our family trees. As a matter of probability, with everyone having millions upon millions of ancestors, it’s practically certain. But the vast majority of your ancestors and mine were the common clay of humanity. At best, they were advisors to those famous kings, or military officers, or members of the court. Maybe they were merchants or priestesses or administrators. More of them weren’t even that elevated. They were farmers clinging to the edge of survival. They were shepherds tending their flocks and herds, worrying about wolves and winter frosts. They were skilled craftspeople breathing in smoke from forges or digging wood splinters out of their fingers.

Most of those people, our ancestors, left only tiny traces in the historical record, if they left any at all: a single clay tablet recording the sale of a pair of enslaved prisoners of war in Assyria; an epitaph for a well-to-do Roman merchant; an entry in a medieval account book; the rusted fragments of an iron knife found among a few bones in a 2000-year-old grave. And still, each and every one of those people was real, and they mattered.

Past Lives is a show about those people and their stories. Every week, we’ll explore the lived experiences and world of a real person who lived in the past. Spanning years and the entire globe, these are the stories of the people who came before us. By understanding them, we can strive to better understand ourselves and our place in this great ongoing endeavor we call humanity. These people were us, and we are them. They mattered, and so do you.

----

You’ll have heard of some of the people we explore on Past Lives before. The vast majority of them, however, will be new to you, even if you’re a huge history buff who has read widely and deeply across different times and places in the past. That’s intentional.

I’ve taken this approach not because there’s nothing left to be learned from the towering figures who dominate the study of human history. Even those of us who took history classes in college mostly learn the subject through the lens of these “greats.” It’s simply a way to reduce the vast sweep of our past into a more manageable form. And every year, fantastic scholars uncover new things about these great individuals—mostly men—and sometimes, they fundamentally change the way we understand them.

That’s awesome. There’s nothing wrong with an enthralling biography or a radical new treatment of a major figure. I’m partial to them myself! I’ve written my fair share of words about famous folks over the years; if you want recommendations, I’m happy to provide a few, or a dozen, or a hundred, enough to keep you thoroughly occupied until the heat death of the universe. In the grand scheme of things, “Great Man” history, as it’s called, isn’t a bad way of simplifying our human past into something we can confidently grasp. A lot of stuff has happened over the past 10,000 years or so, and in that time, millions of lives have been lived.

That’s exactly why we’re not doing “Great Man” history here on Past Lives. Let me tell you why.

At a fundamental level, turning great people into the main characters of history is not only misleading, but also reductive, because these people are all outliers. They’re not normal. They’re not ordinary. Being important or lucky enough to be recorded in some text to which we still have access centuries after that person’s death is in itself unusual. The vast majority of the people who have ever stepped foot on the surface of this planet left no trace of their existence: not a mention in a tax record, not the foundations of the house they lived in, not a footprint in some wet mud that happened to survive the millennia. They were born, they lived, and they died.

While we in the 21st century might not know them, those largely unknown individuals in all their billions were no less or more human than we are. Whether they lived 10 years ago or 10,000, that much remains true. They lived different lives than we do, of course, but their experiences weren’t so very different from ours. These were people: They had favorite foods. They sweated in the heat and shivered in the cold. Their backs and knees ached when they woke up in the morning. Despite an infant and childhood mortality rate that beggars modern belief, they loved their kids every bit as much as we do today.

Past Lives is about forgotten people, not the kings and queens who ruled them, nor the chieftains, lords, aristocrats, and other notables whose names are so much more likely to have survived the vagaries of time. These forgotten people are, in my estimation, the true raw material of human history. Their lives, their experiences, their stories: that’s the iron we ought to be using to forge a better, more inclusive, more representative way of understanding our shared past.

A historical narrative that focuses entirely on the actions of a few people - mostly capital-G, capital-M Great Men - is to treat them as the driving force behind everything important that has ever happened. This isn’t a knock on a propulsive Lincoln biography or an incisive look at the Mughal founder, Babur, or against any rigorous work of reportage on what really happened in the White House War Room the night Osama bin Laden was killed; what I’m saying is that to study history exclusively through the lens of quote-unquote “Great Men” means missing out on a lot of really essential stuff about how the world works. Perspective matters.

I use the word “perspective” deliberately. One of the common misconceptions about history that non-historians tend to have is this idea of bias. Bias implies that there’s a single true version of a given set of events, and that if we just remove the bias from the accounts we have, we can get to that core truth. That’s just not how it works, so allow me to explain.

I’ll give you a concrete example. The great Greek historian Polybius wrote the definitive account of the Roman Republic’s rise to power in the Mediterranean. Polybius was closely associated with a particular clique among the Roman aristocracy, at the center of which was a guy named Scipio Aemilianus. Polybius, unsurprisingly, is pretty complimentary of Scipio Aemilianus. That shapes how he presents Aemilianus’s involvement in some pretty nasty events, like the destruction of Carthage in 146 BC.

Now, if we approach Polybius’s work with the intention of removing his bias, we’d say “Well, he probably exaggerated a bit when it came to Aemilianus, made him look better than he was,” that kind of thing. That stands to reason.

But how are we to understand Polybius’s other, less immediately visible, biases? How are we supposed to know how those biases informed what events he chose to include in his history, what he left out, what he chose to emphasize, and what really crucial thing he glossed over in a few sentences? Enough outside evidence survives that tells us that Polybius, like any writer, was indeed making active choices about how to shape his story. Centuries or millennia removed, we can’t simply excise the writer from the work, or presume to understand precisely what made them tick. That’s the problem with bias.

Perspective, on the other hand, is an empowering concept, especially for a historian. Perspective says that everybody is working from their own, usually implicit, assumptions about how the world works and what matters most. It says that even when we’re recording firsthand accounts of something we’ve just seen, there’s still plenty of room for those assumptions to inform our representation of those events.

Let me give you another example. If you have kids, you’ve probably heard them recount a story about something that happened at school or daycare: Somebody cut somebody else’s hair with the classroom scissors, or there was a shoving match over the swing, or one kid threw a pair of headphones, missed, and cracked the screen on the video board. If you ask five different children what happened, you’ll get five different stories; in the absence of video evidence recording every single moment of the incident, trying to figure out the actual sequence of events isn’t exactly straightforward. And that’s kids doing something innocuous that doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. What happens when we apply this to thornier, more complex events? Political dealings, coups, conquests, and the like? These are the kinds of events no single observer could hope to comprehend anyway, and certainly not without bias.

We’re not going to get a clean recounting of stuff that took place by removing “bias.” Honestly, even the idea that a bare-bones understanding of what happened actually constitutes history seems pretty dubious to me. Far too often, “what happened” is shorthand for focusing on the actions of those so-called great people I was bemoaning a little while ago. History is so much more than that. For every Great Man bending the arc of history to his - almost always his - will, there were uncounted others who had their own perspectives on what was happening, their own experiences of those events. We ought to embrace those perspectives. That starts by changing our approach to studying history, namely by questioning who and what matters most.

----

History is a mosaic of different people’s experiences and stories. It seems natural to tell the story of the American Civil War through the eyes of Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Ulysses S. Grant, and Robert E. Lee. Such a story leads us from the election of 1860 and Fort Sumter to Shiloh and Gettysburg to Ford’s Theater and Appomattox. Lincoln’s letters, Grant’s and Lee’s memoirs, Davis’s official papers: their records become the mortar and glass that comprises our mosaic and creates the larger (and most widely accepted) image of the time. To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with that story. It’s a fine way of doing a political overview of a crucial and transformative five-year period in American history.

But an overview is not the whole story, or even most of it. If we move away from Lincoln and Davis and Grant and Lee and instead use other people’s experiences as our little pieces of colored glass, we could construct an entirely different mosaic, thereby creating an entirely different portrait of the age. We could appreciate what the bullets must have sounded like whistling through the trees on Little Round Top. We could understand the jubilation of enslaved people when Union soldiers arrived in the South Carolina Low Country, burned down the hated big house, and told them what was in the Emancipation Proclamation. We could talk about guerrilla warfare, banditry, and the breakdown of civil society in border states like Missouri. Or we could talk about what was going through the mind of a 26-year-old immigrant from Schleswig-Holstein on the battlefield at Nashville in 1864 right before he was hit with a piece of shrapnel. That was my great-great-great grandfather, a fella named Hans Jordt. If we build our mosaic of the Civil War from pieces like that, how might the broader picture of that age appear? That’s history, too: history from the bottom up, or sometimes the middle out. This approach assembles a more complete narrative because it draws from the lives of ordinary people, that precious raw material I mentioned before.

There’s a fancy term for this kind of narrative approach. We call it “sociological storytelling,” as opposed to biographical storytelling, the kind with which most of us are familiar. Biography is all about understanding the course of a person’s life, what they saw and experienced, and uses that person as a lens for understanding the world in which they lived. Biographies tend to spend a great deal of time on the inner world of their subjects, their psychology, their motivations for doing the things we know they did. That doesn’t mean they leave out the broader world: Any competent biography of Abraham Lincoln is going to spend some time talking about how his experiences in Kentucky and Illinois shaped his character; how his views on slavery evolved in the context of the fight between abolition and slave power before the Civil War; and, not to put too fine a point on it, what made Lincoln so extraordinary compared to his contemporaries. That’s also the weakness of biography. We tend to write biographies of outliers, not ordinary folks. Even when we do see a biography of a regular person, having access to enough information to assemble their full life story is a heck of a lot rarer than we’d like it to be.

Sociological storytelling, by contrast, uses what we know about the world that existed around a given person to illuminate their subjective life and experiences. It looks for the ordinary rather than the extraordinary, how the surviving fragments of a known person’s life might have fit into the society of which they were a part. We can very easily do sociological storytelling for a famous, well-documented person: In the case of Abraham Lincoln, that approach would focus on what aspects of his life and experiences were broadly shared across the antebellum United States, the extent to which his contemporaries shared his views, what he ate and drank, even the chairs he sat in and the way the ever-present clouds of tobacco smoke around him smelled. A sociological approach to Lincoln would situate him firmly in his world first, and then focus on the individual second.

That’s what we’re going to do here on Past Lives. Most of the people we want to get to know better, our raw historical material, didn’t leave enough traces in the record for us to reconstruct their entire life story. They appear in flashes, blinks of an eye, as if we’ve caught a glimpse of them running through a dense forest. Those glimpses - a mention of an enslaved person’s sale in a crumbling ledger, a set of human remains, a throwaway line in a well-known account of a king - are all we have to work with. All I have of my great-great-great grandfather Hans Jordt is his wartime Bible, a photograph of him as an elderly man, and a couple of Grand Army of the Republic ribbons, along with the barest information from census returns. The diary we know he kept during the war is nowhere to be found. Now, we might throw our hands in the air and bemoan how little we can know about these people. We can lament the loss of the evidence, like Hans Jordt’s diary, that would have told us more about an individual’s life story: how the enslaved person recorded in that ledger felt about being ripped away from their culture and family and sold to the highest bidder, who the human remains belonged to, or what my great-great-great grandfather was thinking as the bullets whizzed and shells exploded around him at Nashville.

But even those glimpses matter, because they tell us that these people really did exist. They really were born, lived, and died, and along that journey, their actions shaped the world around them. Those famous Roman senators and generals whose names we still remember were surrounded by dozens, even hundreds of anonymous enslaved people who made their clothing, prepared their food, and ran their baths. Thousands of humble Roman citizens, their names lost to time, cast votes to put them in office. We can talk about the miracles of the Industrial Revolution all we want—the genius of inventors and the cleverness of the investors who poured capital into new technologies—but it was factory workers who made the things that propelled the world into a new age. Lincoln’s views on slavery, even the fact of him being president at that moment of crisis, wouldn’t have mattered unless hundreds of thousands of people like Hans Jordt were willing to pick up a rifle and put on a blue uniform and march off to war. History is made of the millions upon millions of individual moments that ordinary people do every day, not just the actions of Great Men.

That’s what Past Lives is all about. Each season will focus on a particular unifying theme that spans space and time, giving us an opportunity to look at the lives of regular folks. My hope is that by assembling a wide variety of perspectives from different eras and regions around the world, we’ll be able to illuminate some larger aspects of that theme: our very own mosaic view of a topic, made up of the experiences of ordinary people.

Our first theme will be slavery. Slavery as an institution has existed on this planet since the beginning of recorded history more than 5,000 years ago, and it almost certainly goes back even further. In several times and places, like the antebellum South or the ancient Mediterranean, the entirety of the economic and social system was rooted in slavery; elsewhere and at other times, enslaved people lived among the free masses, silently shaping their own lives as well as those of their masters in ways both large and small.

Over the next twelve episodes, we’ll look at twelve people who were enslaved at some point in their lives. They range in time and space from ancient Assyria, where a woman named Nanaya’ila’i and her daughter were brutally kidnapped from their home, to Matilda McCrear, the last survivor of the Transatlantic slave trade. Some of our subjects were counted among the lowest of the low in their societies. Others - not many, but a few - were quite well off, or even rose to extraordinary heights. For a few, slavery was a lifelong condition that followed them from birth to death. For most, it wasn’t. The experience of being enslaved marked a fundamental break with their past selves, a kind of social death. My hope is that by understanding a spectrum of experiences of the enslaved, we’ll understand slavery itself better: how it benefited the owners, how those benefits have continued to trickle down through time, and far more importantly, what it did to its victims.

Be sure to go and listen to episode two of Past Lives, where we’ll spend a little time making sense of slavery over the big picture and the long term. It’s already available right now, and so is our look at our first real people, Nanaya’ila’i and her daughter, in ancient Assyria.

Make sure you subscribe to this feed, and click the link in the episode description to head over to the Past Lives Patreon! It’s only seven bucks a month. We already have tons of bonus content, like interviews with great historians about their favorite historical people, and we’re adding more every week. Our Patreon is also where you’ll also find our Past Lives chat, where you can talk about history with other interested folks—I’ll even drop in from time to time. We’ll have a weekly discussion thread - the first one is about the best history books you’ve ever read - and, if you’re a patron, you’ll get to vote on what we read for our monthly Past Lives book club. Past Lives is a 100-percent independent production, and your support is what allows us to make this show. So, thank you.

Past Lives is written and narrated by me, Patrick Wyman. The producer is Morgan Jaffe. The sound designer is Gabriel Gould. The story editor is Rachel Kambury.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the Past Lives Patreon to receive access to all the bonus content, including text versions of every episode, and you can find the Past Lives RSS feed here, subscribe on Apple Podcasts, or subscribe on Spotify.

1) Season 1, Episode 1: Introducing Past Lives. We discuss the differences between biographical and sociological storytelling and why the human past needs more and different perspectives to actually tell us what people experienced and how history unfolded.

2) Season 1, Episode 2: On Slavery. Slavery is a huge and complicated topic, an institution that has existed all over the world since the beginning of recorded history. How did it differ from place to place and age to age, and how can we understand it comparatively? Were there “better” and “worse” versions of slavery?

3) Season 1, Episode 3: Nanaya’ila’i and the Bleeding Edge of Empire. We meet our first historical individual, a woman named Nanaya’ila’i, who along with her daughter was brutally ripped away from her home by the Assyrians around 645 BC. What did slavery do for the Assyrians, and what did it to to Nanaya’ila’i?

4) Bonus Interview: The wonderful C.E. Aubin, host of This Guy Sucked, joins me to discuss the 20th-century philosopher Walter Benjamin, his fascinating life, and how he foresaw the rise of fascism in ways his contemporaries didn’t prior to his tragic death.

From here, we’ll move on to discuss a Thracian mining overseer named Sosias, who was the most expensive slave sold in classical Athens; a sex worker, Neaira, who also lived in Athens; and the gladiator Crixus, one of the leaders of the Spartacus rebellion against Rome. The bonus content is pretty excellent, too, featuring an interview with Jason Herbert of Reckoning (formerly Historians at the Movies), our first Book Club, a discussion of sources and methods, and much more.

You won’t want to miss any of it, so be sure to follow the main feed on your podcast player of choice and smash that subscribe button on Patreon!

This is bittersweet. Tides is my baby. I pitched it to Wondery as one of the network’s first original shows back in early 2017, long before they were adapting series for Netflix or making deals worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars with the likes of the Kelces and Smartless, and Tides survived every up and down in a volatile industry. I’m proud of that, and proud of the kind of work I’ve been able to do for the better part of a decade. Making Tides has been one of the great joys of my life, and I’m excited to end our active run with some great stuff on ancient economies, daily life in ancient societies, and some thoughts on doing history for popular audiences. That’s all coming between now and the end of April, and I hope you’ll stick with us for it.

But it’s also time to make something new and different. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, what I would do if Tides ever came to an end, and the result of all those years of considering what another history show might look like is ready to share with you all now. Welcome to Past Lives

.

The best stuff I’ve ever done, the most personally satisfying to make and what has resonated the most with audiences, focuses on ordinary people and how they experienced the world. You might remember Wulfila the Goth from my first show, Fall of Rome, or the other composite characters who have guided us through millennia of the human past over the years on Tides. Past Lives takes this approach and applies it to real people, the common clay of humanity, the raw material that has forged the actual course of history over the very long term.

It’s all well and good to tell the story of our shared past through the lens of the most famous, most powerful, and best-known people who have lived over the past 5,000 years of recorded history: Alexander the Great, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Suleiman the Magnificent, Catherine the Great, Abraham Lincoln, and Margaret Thatcher all have something to teach us about why the world is the way it is.

Most of us, by contrast, aren’t rich, powerful, and famous. We’re just ordinary folks, living ordinary lives. But we’re still a part of the story of history. Our actions shape the fate of the world and our species. We all matter in ways great and small.

That’s what Past Lives is all about: recovering the stories of the forgotten people who make up the vast, unexplored bulk of humanity. Listen to the trailer now:

If you’ve enjoyed the work I’ve done on Tides of History over the years, or the writing I’ve shared here on Perspectives, I can promise that you’ll love Past Lives even more. Subscribe to the feed now so you don’t miss the three episodes dropping when the show launches on December 3rd.

Past Lives is a 100-percent independent production. We’re relying on our listeners to support us, which you can do through our Patreon page. Join now and comment on our introductory post to tell me what Types of Guy you’d like to see me cover! When the show launches, the Patreon will include bonus interviews, Q&A sessions with me, a monthly book club, informal discussions of a variety of topics, and hopefully much more as time goes on. If you prefer to read instead of listen, paid subscribers will have access to each episode script in newsletter form at the same time the episode goes live.

I really hope you give Past Lives a shot, because I’m incredibly excited about it, the team I’m putting together to make it, and what the future might hold. Subscribe on your podcast platform of choice and keep your eyes peeled for more in the very near future!

(Terracotta statuette of a woman, eastern Greek, 6th century BC, via the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Her breath came in gasps as she made her way up the path that wound its way up the hillside. She paused, took a swig of water from her skin, and put her hand on an outcropping of gray-white limestone. It was still cool, not yet warmed by the sun rising over the hills to the east. Before moving on, she reached down into the leather bag she carried slung over her shoulder. Her hand closed around the clay figurines, just to be sure they were still there. The other went, reflexively, to her swollen abdomen, and on cue, she felt the baby kick.

Slowly, her breath coming back, the woman continued her climb. Not much further now to the top, she thought, her hand still resting on her stomach. The baby kicked again. Not much further till that, either, she thought, and she should know. This was her sixth pregnancy, and each time, she had delivered a healthy, living child without complications.

That made her a rarity, and she knew precisely how lucky she was. Too many of the girls she’d known in her childhood, and women she’d known down in the cluster of villages, hadn’t survived. She had seen it herself: the pain, the blood, the fevers afterward, a gauntlet of trials and risks that had claimed so many lives. There was a tree on this hilltop that her mother had told her was sacred to the goddess Artemis, and before each birth, the woman had trekked upward to make her offering. It had worked thus far, just as it had worked for her mother, who waited down in their home with her children.

There was the tree, a tall cypress, and a flat stone underneath it, covered with offerings. She took the clay figurines, one of Artemis and the other of Zeus and Hera’s daughter Eileithyia, who watched over women in childbirth, out of her leather bag. Placing them carefully on the stone, she whispered her request: to keep her and her baby safe during childbirth, and if it wasn’t too much to ask, to see them safely through the months and years afterward as well.

The task done, she turned and walked back down the hill, pausing every once in a while to catch her breath and sip from the waterskin. The sounds and smells of the villages, growing closer to one another every year, wafted up toward her: fragrant smoke from the kilns, the tinkling of shattered pottery, mooing and baaing from the animals, laughter and shouts from the villagers. She should tell her eldest daughter, herself only a few years from marriage and childbirth, about the tree - just in case she didn’t make it through this time.

Share

Subscribe now

This is the only time Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter appear in the historical record. We have no idea what happened to them, but it’s likely that they remained in the city of Aššur until its sack at the hands of the invading Medes, part of a coalition of enemies that eventually toppled the mighty Assyrian Empire. If that was the case, then Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter experienced not one but two brutal campaigns of mass violence in their lives. The first had seen them captured and enslaved in a foreign land, with no hope of ever seeing their home in Elam again; the second involved the brutal sack of the city in which they had lived for decades, with all the horror - massacres, mass sexual violence, and destruction - that went along with it. If they survived, then the two women were almost certain to have been enslaved again, perhaps to be sold east, to Media, or south, to Babylonia.

Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter were just two of the thousands upon thousands of victims of the Assyrian Empire, most of whose names have been lost over the centuries. The Assyrian Empire was just one of the many aggressive polities that has produced victims by the thousands over the past several millennia: The Romans did no better in Gaul or Dacia. Alexander the Great razed Thebes on his way to far more expansive conquests. The crusaders who took Jerusalem in 1099 waded ankle-deep in blood, Timur Lenk left behind towers of skulls marking his conquests. Pizarro slaughtered the Inca by the score. The Nazis left behind millions of corpses. As long as grasping rulers and would-be warlords have sought to expand their power, common people have suffered the consequences, just like Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter.

But those ambitious politicians and conquerors didn’t do the dirty work themselves. They had underlings, generals and officers and common soldiers and bureaucrats, to enforce their will. Those underlings participated in acts that, by any reasonable standard of moral behavior, range from the merely distasteful to completely abhorrent. It would be comforting to think that those who murdered children, burned houses with the residents inside, committed acts of sexual violence, and enslaved the survivors were uniquely evil. It would be easier to believe that these participants had somehow forfeited their humanity somewhere along their path to organized violence. We would prefer to fool ourselves into thinking they formed a special class of malefactors separate from the farmers and shopkeepers and laborers who made up their societies as a whole. These ideas would be wrong. The agents of empire and conquest were not a marked group of sadists; they fit quite comfortably within the mainstream of the societies that produced them and benefited from their actions.

Share

There are exceptions, of course, in varying degrees. Soldiers serving at the sharp end of campaigns of conquest might be drawn from specific ethnic or social groups outside the mainstream, such as Ottoman Janissaries or the semi-barbarian professionals of the later Roman Empire. They might have become habituated to violence through long periods of service, thinking little of heinous acts that would shock and horrify civilians. But by and large, those soldiers - even if they were disproportionately likely to perform military service - were drawn from the normal strata of their societies. The Romans who destroyed Carthage in 146 BC were citizen-soldiers, even if that often meant many years of experience in the later years of the Middle Republic. The mercenaries who sacked Rome in 1527 and committed a variety of atrocities, ranging from the rape of nuns and murder of civilians to the desecration of holy relics, had gone unpaid for years; for many of them, war was their chosen profession, but far more saw it as an occasional side-business for a season or two between monotonous stints in workshops or fields.

The group of ten men who profited from the sale of Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter in the city of Aššur were entirely ordinary. That group included a baker, a weaver, a cook, a shepherd, an ironsmith, and a goldsmith, some of whom worked for a local temple. The most likely explanation for how they came into the possession of Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter is that these ten men formed a kisru, or “knot,” the standard unit in which Assyrians performed their required services to the king. These ten ordinary men were thus part-time soldiers, called up for the campaign to Elam, and Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter were their payment for their service on that campaign. When they got back to Aššur, the ten-man kisru couldn’t easily divide up two captives, so they sold her and split the profits: about 50 grams of silver per man, which they then took back to their homes, families, and occupations as iron- and goldsmiths, bakers, and cooks. The two Elamite women were enslaved, and the ten Assyrian men benefited directly from their participation in that campaign.

Did the weaver and cook talk about it, we might wonder? Did they tell their wives and children about what they had seen during the vicious sack of the Elamite capital of Susa, the fire and the ransacked royal tombs and desecrated temples that the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal bragged about in his account of these events, the wanton killing and sexual assault, the enslaved who died on the march back to Aššur? Were they proud of what they’d done, did they feel shame, or did they even think about those events? Did they seem like the actions of other people in other lives, unconnected to the workaday existence of an ironmonger and a baker going about their lives in the spiritual home of the Assyrian Empire?

We simply don’t know the answers to those questions, and we never will. The source material that would allow us to formulate an answer doesn’t exist. The members of that Assyrian kisru who profited from the sale of Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter left behind no narratives of their inner lives and thoughts that might allow us to construct a ground-up view of Assyrian imperialism: no journals, no inscriptions, nothing of that sort. They appeared in the historical record for that one fleeting moment, just as Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter did, but as the beneficiaries rather than the victims of an organized campaign of conquest and terror. The 50 grams of silver each received would have gone toward food, shelter, a set of fine pottery, investment in a trading enterprise, better tools for the ironworker or goldsmith, or perhaps even the purchase of another enslaved person. They materially benefited from the suffering of the Elamites in general and Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter in particular. Why should the members of that kisru, or the thousands of other Assyrians who participated in the campaign, have felt bad about it? Why should their wives and children and dependents? That was how the world worked. Within decades, of course, the same fate would be visited upon them by the Medes.

The Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, who led the expedition to Elam, certainly didn’t feel bad about it; he celebrated his accomplishments, the deeds his soldiers carried out on his behalf. Here’s how he describes his actions: “I had the sanctuaries of the land Elam utterly destroyed and I counted its gods and its goddesses as ghosts… I destroyed and devastated the tombs of their earlier and later kings… I took their bones to Assyria. I prevented their ghosts from sleeping and deprived them of funerary-offerings and libations… On a march of one month and twenty-five days, I devastated the districts of the land Elam and scattered salt and cress over them.”

The image above depicts Ashurbanipal relaxing in his garden while being attended to by a coterie of servants. The decapitated head of the Elamite king hangs from a tree on the left side of the image. Ashurbanipal didn’t cut that head off himself; other people, men no different than the goldsmith and weaver and cook, did the deed at his command. Perhaps they felt they had no choice. Perhaps they felt disgusted and had nightmares about it for the rest of their days. Perhaps they celebrated their participation, and told the story to rapt audiences in taverns and wine-shops: It wasn’t every day one got to decapitate a king, after all.

Assyrian kings were particularly vociferous about the gory details of their conquests, but they differed from other conquerors of that age and others only in their commitment to recording flayings, decapitations, and salting the earth. Their Neo-Babylonian successors, who famously destroyed Jerusalem in 587 BC and thus began the Babylonian Exile, were if anything worse; they just bragged about it less. The list of conquerors goes on and on: Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Umayyads, Mongols, all the way up to the empires of the recent past. While we may know the names of the rulers who so desperately wanted to be remembered, we shouldn’t forget about the people on the business end of those conquests, those who held the swords and the torches. We shouldn’t let them off the hook, just as we shouldn’t forget their victims, people like Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter, whose names so rarely enter the historical record.

It’s only in much more recent times that we have access to the detailed workings of a campaign of mass violence, including the thoughts and actions of those who participated directly. The best documented and most thoroughly explored is, of course, the Holocaust. In my opinion, the most illuminating book on the topic is the historian Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution. Browning’s research focuses on a unit of reservists, Police Battalion 101, who were drawn from the utterly average population of the city of Hamburg.

Hamburg was considered to be, if not anti-Nazi, then at least not particularly Nazi-fied. They weren’t dedicated Nazis, and only about 25 percent even belonged to the Nazi Party. They weren’t heavily indoctrinated shock troops. They weren’t recruited from a particularly violent and antisocial segment of German society. These were utterly ordinary men, dock-workers and truck drivers and waiters, hence the title of the book. Most were middle-aged family men, fathers and husbands, drawn from the working and lower middle classes. Few of the formation sent to Poland in 1942 had served in the earlier stages of the war, and only the very oldest reservists had fought in World War I.

But what these men did during their time in Poland was extraordinary in its scale and brutality. Over the course of less than a year, in the second half of 1942 and the first half of 1943, the several hundred members of Reserve Police Battalion 101 shot and killed 38,000 Jews. Many of those killings happened as mass executions with hundreds or thousands of victims; others took place as patrols swept the countryside for individuals or small groups. Using rifles, submachine guns, and pistols at point-blank range, they murdered men, women, and children, tossing them into hastily dug pits or leaving the bodies in the open. They walked away covered in the blood and viscera of their victims and went back to their barracks. Then, a few days or weeks later, they did it again.

Somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the battalion refused to participate in these killings, despite a complete lack of formal consequences for those who wouldn’t shoot. This means that 80 to 90 percent of these entirely ordinary men became mass murderers without explicit coercion over the course of just a few months. Some relished their role in the killings, and volunteered for any opportunity to do more, but they were a minority compared to the willing but not especially enthusiastic participants. Most simply followed their orders, even when those orders meant murdering defenseless people of all ages. Browning’s thesis, in a nutshell, is this: “Ultimately, the Holocaust took place because at the most basic level individual human beings killed other human beings in large numbers over an extended period of time. The grass-roots perpetrators became “professional killers.”2

Historians have spent a great deal of time arguing about Ordinary Men and whether this holds true for the entire Holocaust. One forceful and oft-repeated counterargument states that the German populace as a whole was so steeped in a particular kind of virulent anti-Semitism that these men were ready and waiting to become mass murderers of Jews.3 As soon as they had their orders, that deep-rooted hatred kicked in, and the killings happened. Without denying the rampant anti-Semitism of the age, it doesn’t satisfactorily explain the leap to mass murder. Browning has engaged with that line of argument in great detail, as have the generation of historians to come afterward. I find his perspective - one focused on social pressure - much more convincing than the alternative, that Germans of the 1940s were uniquely qualified to become perpetrators of genocide.

Why? Because of Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter, and the ten-man kisru that profited from their sale in the city of Aššur more than 2600 years ago. These perfectly ordinary perpetrators can be found all over history, from Aššur to post-war Hamburg, where the members of Reserve Police Battalion 101 returned to their perfectly ordinary lives. They seamlessly re-integrated back into society, at least until they were thoroughly investigated for war crimes 20 years later. None became pariahs, just as the Assyrian baker and goldsmith did not become social outcasts. The Romans who destroyed Carthage in 146 BC went back to their farms after their years on campaign. Some of the people who committed mass murder in the Killing Fields in Cambodia are still smoking cigarettes outside Phnom Penh bars. The landsknechts and other mercenaries who sacked Rome in 1527 returned to their workshops and fields. Ordinary people did horrific things, and then went right back to being ordinary people, whatever nightmares they might have seen when they closed their eyes at night.

The destruction of Elam was not the Holocaust, just as the Rwandan Genocide wasn’t the Holocaust or the Cambodian Genocide. The destruction of Elam wasn’t the Rwandan Genocide. The destruction of Elam wasn’t even the Assyrian destruction of Israel a century or so beforehand. The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the anti-Huguenot pogrom that killed between 5,000 and 20,000 people in France in 1572, differed meaningfully from the many anti-Jewish pogroms in the later Russian Empire. The Holocaust wasn’t the same as the Herero and Namaqua Genocide, the mass murder of indigenous people in what is now Namibia by the German Empire between 1904 and 1907, despite the fact that both were carried out by German authorities just a generation apart.

Each of those incidents and campaigns of mass violence stands on its own. Their logic was different. They proceeded in different ways, with death tolls ranging from the dozens to the millions. Some were straightforward land grabs in which killing was incidental. Others were ideologically motivated campaigns of murder for which the groundwork had been laid for decades or centuries. Still others were the result of sudden explosions of ethnic or religious hatred against a background of oppression or conflict. But what ties them together, aside from the mass violence, is the fact that utterly ordinary people participated in all of them. It doesn’t take all that much for a baker from Aššur or a truck-driver from Hamburg to turn into a willing enslaver and killer, even a mass murderer who pulled a lethal trigger hundreds of times, under the right circumstances. If those in positions of authority tell them that it’s acceptable or even admirable, if they’re given the tools and the opportunity to do so, then even the most average people can commit horrifying acts.

We would all like to believe that when faced with the choice, as the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were before their first mass killing, we would at the very least refuse to participate. In the more flattering version, we would throw down our weapons, give a rousing speech about how wrong it all is, convince our weaker-willed comrades to do the same, and prevent this great tragedy from happening. We know that mass murder is wrong, that it’s wrong to drag somebody hundreds of miles away from home into slavery, to burn down their homes and do all the other horrible things that accompany war; how could anybody just go along with it, let alone embrace it?

The deeply uncomfortable answer is that the vast majority of us are just as ordinary as the members of Reserve Police Battalion 101. We’re not as different from the ten-man kisru that went to Elam and returned home with a pair of enslaved women to sell as we would like to believe. Americans of the 20th century, victors against those same Nazis - as close to canonical Good Guys as recent history might produce - still committed horrific war crimes.4 The 21st century, with all its aspirations toward and lofty rhetoric about peace and fairness and the rules-based international order, is still populated by people. Being able to recite a line from one of Martin Luther King’s speeches, or quote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, isn’t a vaccine against wanton cruelty. Social pressure, cultural norms, groupthink, whatever we might want to call it: we’re all susceptible, far more so than the comforting narratives we tell ourselves about free will, human rights, and the respect for our fellow people.

War, and even more mundane forms of ongoing conflict, can far too easily make monsters of us all. Once the horrors begin, they suck in even those who consider themselves good, solid, moral people. Under the right circumstances, we might all do terrible things.

Share

Subscribe now

Climate change isn’t an issue unique to the 21st century. The climate is constantly in flux, on every time scale from years to millennia, every geographic scale from the local to the global. Changes in the amount of sunlight reaching the planet, ocean currents, and atmospheric circulation and precipitation alter the entire Earth: In the past 20,000 years, for example, the Sahara Desert has been an arid region even larger than its current extent, then a green expanse of lakes and savannahs, and now an expanding desert once again. Sea levels rise and fall and rise. Biomes spanning whole continents, such as the Mammoth Steppe (or steppe-tundra) that characterized much of the planet during the last Ice Age, can and do disappear. On the other end of the temporal and geographic scale, volcanic eruptions can destroy a locality or blot out the sun across a hemisphere for a year or two. A single hurricane can ravage a coastline, or warmer and wetter temperatures might render a whole sea far less welcoming to people.

We also know that people have been altering their environments for as long as the archaeological record provides us with the right kind of evidence to see it, such as the traces of charcoal left over from burning vegetation. People cut down forests for fuel and building materials. They replace native vegetation with domesticated species. Hunting and habitat destruction drive wild animals to extinction. Intensive agriculture drains the soil of nutrients, and the voluminous waste produced by dense settlements renders whole areas uninhabitable. Like natural processes of climate change, human environmental alteration takes place on a variety of different time scales: immediate, as when we clear-cut a forest; medium-term, as the silting of a river thanks to upstream deforestation resulting in erosion; and long-term, for example, by fundamentally altering the plant and animal species present in an area. Thanks to fossil fuels and the explosion of human populations over the past couple of centuries, our ability to change the whole planet’s climate - anthropogenic climate change - has increased many times over; but the basic idea, that we humans are living in an unstable world that we can and do alter in profound ways, remains much the same.

Share

For what it’s worth, one recent paper argues that the real turning point in our ability to change the planet arrived not with the Industrial Revolution but with the global spread of farming in the Neolithic. By introducing whole suites of domesticated plants and animals, the “Neolithic Multispecies Resettlement Camps” in the words of the anthropologist James Scott, we dramatically increased our scale and impact on the environment. Even a single Neolithic village could profoundly change the local area around it; creating a whole landscape of Neolithic villages altered those environments on a massive scale.

Although these two things - human alteration of our environments and “natural” processes of climate change - might seem to be quite different, they’re united by the fact that we still have to deal with them. The cause of those changes, anthropogenic or natural, isn’t as important as the necessity of figuring out how to respond to them. Human societies deal with both through the same mechanisms, and we’ve been dealing with them for our entire existence.

On one hand, this line of long-term thinking can lead to complacency. If people have been dealing with a changing climate since the very beginning, and we’ve been changing our environments for much if not all of that time, then why bother worrying about it? We’ll get by as we always have before. On the other hand, this reasoning can also lead to a species of doomerism. We’ve changed our environments before, but never on this scale, a scale that can only lead to our destruction of Earth as a habitable planet. Either we get out, becoming multi-planetary, or we’re going down with the ship.

Those are the extreme ends of the spectrum, with a huge variety of viewpoints and possibilities in between. But no matter where one might fall on that spectrum, from apathy to panic, supporting massive intervention to change the trajectory or advocating a completely hands-off approach, it’s worth thinking about how millions of years of our ancestors have dealt with changing climates. Whether we see them as models to emulate or cautionary tales to avoid - and we can find plenty of examples of both in the archaeological and historical records - we ought to see what they have to teach us.

With that in mind, here are a few guiding principles - gleaned from my reading through scholarship covering the past several hundred thousand years of human-environment interactions - that we can usefully apply to thinking about the present.

Humans aren’t simply prisoners of their environments.

People aren’t leaves on the wind, buffeted by environmental forces beyond their comprehension, prisoners of forces we can neither understand nor control. Our species is supremely adaptable - in fact, that’s our most outstanding trait - and we’re smart enough, and resilient enough, to deal with changes as they come up. When short-term or localized changes render an area unusable, we move away to areas that are usable. When long-term changes render a whole way of life (subsistence, patterns of settlement, etc.) unviable, we change that way of life to something that better fits the climatic context. When our habitats are unstable over the short and medium term, we build that instability into our way of life, making it flexible enough to deal with things like extreme El Nino events or rapid shifts in sea level.

It’s never a matter of, well, the climate’s changing, so we’re screwed; instead, we have choices. There was a strong tendency in what I call the first wave of climate scholarship (both historical and archaeological) to look for changes in the past climate record, and to directly correlate those changes with downturns in human societies. If the climate was going bad, the reasoning went, getting colder and drier, then people were obviously going to be in trouble. If you see a volcanic eruption in the climate record in Iceland, then you’re going to see a famine that year or the next in the annals of a northern European abbey. If you’ve got a long drought at the same time as the abandonment of cities, then the drought caused the collapse of that urban society. As it turns out, however, the relationship between changing climate and the fate of human societies doesn’t match lines on a graph. It’s not straightforwardly causal, with shifts in climate causing the downfall of a dynasty or the end of an urban civilization. Causality is a much more complicated thing to figure out.

I’ll focus on one particular example. There was a major aridification event across much of Eurasia and North Africa around 2200 BC, known as the 4.2ka event. Right around that time, Egypt’s Old Kingdom - the age of the pyramid-building pharaohs - came to an end. So did the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia, the fruits of Sargon of Akkad and his descendants. The documentary and archaeological record tell us that this was an unstable time across that whole region. People abandoned long-occupied settlements, went on the move, and adopted new lifestyles (more pastoralism, e.g.) in response to these shifts. Established political orders struggled to adapt, and many simply failed.

Yet in South Asia, by contrast, the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) weathered these climatic shifts just fine, surviving several centuries more before the eventual abandonment of its cities. So far as we know, the climate in South Asia suffered no less than nearby Mesopotamia, but the IVC did not fall apart. The 4.2ka event may have led to more rainfall, not less, in the Alps of Europe. A series of sophisticated late Neolithic societies collapsed in China around that time, the events ranging in time from 2300 BC to 1800 BC, but can we lump all of those processes together into a single climatic event? Even when we zoom in more closely on affected areas, such as Egypt and Mesopotamia, some localities and regions seem to manage just fine without major changes, while others suffered.

Clearly, whatever was happening with a major, well-documented climatic event was more complicated than “when climates change, societies fall apart.” There was a correlation, but the climatic shift interfaced with existing ways of life, modes of thought, and every other process that was happening at the time. That applies across the historical and archaeological record.

Ideas, institutions, and politics shape our responses to climate change.

This follows from the first point. Our options for dealing with changing climates are not endless. The choices we make are conditioned by our understanding of what’s possible and desirable; the mechanisms we have for enacting change; the contingencies of the particular moment, such as who’s in charge and whether or not they’re competent; and how we even understand what’s happening, to name just a few of the almost infinite list of possibilities.

Here’s a thought experiment. You live in a fertile river valley with regular rains and mild floods that replenish the soil and water your crops. That’s been the case for as long as anyone can remember. But then the rains don’t come for two years in a row, and the floods stop, too. Your crops fail, then fail again the following year. You might turn to fishing - after all, there’s a river right there - but how successful are you going to be at fishing if you don’t have an established tradition of catching fish or the technological toolkit to do it well? What if you define your society by farming, by the ownership of particular plots of land and your relationship to the forces of fertility and nature? What if you’re ruled by a clique of shaman-chiefs whose legitimacy derives from their claim to produce good harvests? That climatic shift, the two years of missed harvests, would be far more damaging to the farming society than to a nearby group of foragers who could simply move, or focus their activities on a different food source. One year, they might eat a lot of nuts; in another, hunt a lot of deer; in another, fish the river, gather berries, or go to the coast and look for shellfish.

In this scenario, that hypothetical group of foragers would be more resilient to climatic change than that hypothetical farming society. Rather than being tied to the land and to a limited group of domesticated crops, they could range more broadly and exploit a wider range of resources. Institutionally, their structures of leadership would not be bound up with the harvest, thus rendering decision-making easier and less fraught with conflict in a crisis. In other circumstances, perhaps the farming society would be more resilient, with communal stores of grain and a larger population to weather the band times and absorb losses due to famine and disease. Resilience is a major theme in climate studies, and it can come from a variety of different sources, ranging from methods of subsistence to political institutions to religious beliefs that accommodate and explain natural disasters.

Simply put, it’s hard to predict precisely how a given society will deal with either a short-term environmental disaster or a long-term shift in the climate. Societies that seem remarkably stable and long-lived might fall apart with a feather-light touch of rising sea levels or drought. Simple folk living at the edge of subsistence might starve. Alternatively, sophisticated and stable societies might have the resilience to ride out those initial waves of disaster, collapsing centuries later without an obvious connection to that past climatic event. Simple folk might have the flexibility to alter their way of life and even thrive under the new conditions.

People can be winners, losers, or something in between, but they’re always affected.

Not everybody is going to lose when climatic conditions shift and human environments are destroyed. Hunter-gatherers suffer when their prey animals - mammoths, for example - are driven to extinction, but that creates openings for pastoralists to utilize the landscape for herds of domesticated animals. Pastoralists relying on domesticates suffer when aridification reduces to desert the marginal pasture-land on which they rely, but the lack of grazing animals might allow for large-scale mineral exploration. Rising sea levels might drown coastal plains, but they can also create new wetland environments full of exploitable resources.

Large grazers, such as elephants, suffer disproportionately when people hunt them (because their gestation periods are so tortuously long) and destroy their habitats; but smaller ones, such as deer and boar, thrive in the mosaic environments of intermixed grassland and forest that human intervention tends to create. Societies built on hunting those large grazers would fail, while those oriented around hunting deer and boar would thrive. That’s essentially the story of the transition from the late Pleistocene to the early Holocene, for example, around 12,000 years ago. The same principles apply more broadly. One region might suffer disastrous consequences over the long term because of changes in precipitation and temperature, becoming uninhabitable for its residents. Those same shifts in precipitation and temperature can make another region, the beneficiary of warmer conditions and increased rainfall, dramatically more welcoming and viable.

We can see this clearly in the archaeological record: Patterns of habitation in the landscape vary from era to era, and shifts in local environmental conditions play a significant role in where people decide to live. A region that’s densely populated in one era - the aforementioned Indus Valley of South Asia around 2000 BC, for example - might be nearly deserted 1,000 years later. Conversely, a much less populated area - the Ganges Plain around 2000 BC - might be much thicker with human settlement 1,000 years later.

One region’s, or society’s, or group’s, loss can be another’s gain. Precisely who wins and loses is a function of geography and the patterns of climate change, of course, but it’s also about who the ability to exploit changing circumstances. Ability might mean flexibility in subsistence modes and resilience thanks to kinship networks that distribute help from one family to another. It might also mean having the weapons and the military infrastructure to simply take a more appealing area from its current inhabitants. Even if far more people end up worse off thanks to a climatic shift or environmental destruction - populations drop by half or two thirds and the overall level of social complexity and technological acumen falls - there might still be winners in that scenario: a small group that finds a new ecological niche and expands in numbers, or a new elite that exploits the chaos to establish themselves as rulers.

Should you feel better or worse about climate change and environmental alteration?

I can’t answer that for you. Maybe I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, or can’t figure out on your own. On the whole, thinking about this issue over the very long term makes me feel more optimistic about the overall survival of humanity as a species. We might kill off 95 percent of us over the course of a couple of centuries of terrible climatic upheaval, and while that would very obviously be a bad thing in any number of ways, we wouldn’t be extinct. That’s a breed of optimism, I suppose, if you stare at it hard enough. At the same time, however, I feel far more pessimistic about the survival of a postmodern, post-industrial way of life, our specific mode of civilization, patterns of urbanism, and everything that goes along with it. Whether we make conscious choices to adapt an unsustainable way of doing things to something more sustainable, or we’re forced to do so by a series of localized disasters and global processes, the historical and archaeological records suggest that we’ll have to make major alterations as conditions change.

That, I suppose, is the major takeaway here: We have some agency - not all the agency, but some - to decide how bad it gets, who suffers and who benefits, whether those changes are preemptive or a reaction to an ongoing catastrophe. The most vulnerable people don’t have to lose everything so that others maintain or improve their standard of living. Life will go on one way or another, because human life goes on no matter what’s happening around us, but it can be better or worse depending on what we collectively decide to do.

Share

Subscribe now

That’s been alright, though, because I haven’t felt like I’ve had all that much to say, and particularly not about ongoing events. Sure, I could fire off some Takes and make half-assed historical comparisons between the past and present. If I were willing to talk about topics with which I’m not familiar, but could pretend to be, then the opportunities would be effectively endless. Those Takes might even have gotten some attention and readership. But I don’t think there’s a lot of value in that for either you, the readers, or for myself, personally or professionally. I’m not a Takesman (shout-out to Charles Barkley and Stephen A. Smith, the best to ever do it), I’m not a blogger, and I’m not a cable-news pundit. Other people can do that stuff if they want to; it’s not my business to judge their professional choices or the incentives that make them viable. I’m a historian, I guess, and an observer of what’s happening in the world, and if I’m going sit down to write a thing then it’s going to be worth my and your time.

So, with my explanation-cum-self-righteous screed out of the way, here’s what I’m planning on doing with this Substack over the next weeks and months.

• Occasional lengthy essays. The first will be on how to think about the long-term relationship between people and their environments - how climate changes over time, how people adapt to changing conditions, how we ourselves change our environments, and what we can learn from this constant of human existence. I also went through a big phase of reading about insurgencies throughout history last year, and I might share some of what I learned about that in another essay.

• Historical People. I’ll pick a person, from anywhere or anyplace in the past couple of hundred thousand years, and try to locate them in their place and time on the basis of the available evidence: textual, archaeological, whatever, let’s just try to get to know a person who lived a long time ago. They were more like us than we can imagine.

• Coverage of interesting stuff happening in history, archaeology, and palaeoanthropology. This is still a really exciting time to be interested in these topics, especially archaeology, because a) there’s so much new work being done, and b) the techniques and methods are so much different, and more advanced, than simply digging up artifacts. You’ve probably heard of ancient DNA, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

• Books and other media that are worth your time. I read a lot, some for work and some for fun, and if you fine folks are interested then I’ll be happy to share that with you.

• Discussion threads. Exactly what they sound like. Hit me up and ask some questions, I’ll do my best to answer them.

If there’s enough interest in these topics, then I’ll do more of them, adding a tier for subscribers. Depending on what happens with Tides of History in the coming year, maybe this place will be the home for a new podcast as well.

So, let me know what you think. I’m stoked to be writing more, and can’t wait to share some of what I’ve learned during my time away. We’ll chat more soon.

Subscribe now

Share

But over the past couple of months, I’ve been working on something near and dear to my heart: a podcast about Dad Culture, everything from tall wooden ships to comfortable sneakers to sandwiches to history. It’s called The Pursuit of Dadliness, and it launches today with two episodes. You can listen to the trailer right here:

Subscribe now wherever you get your podcasts - just search “Pursuit of Dadliness” and hammer that follow button.

Let me tell you a little bit about the Pursuit of Dadliness and what you can expect from it. First of all, you absolutely do not have to be a father, in the technical sense, to listen to or enjoy this show. Dadliness is not defined by the mere fact of having fathered children. Dadliness, to me, is all about embracing the freedom to explore our passions without the fear of seeming somehow uncool, or trying to impress anybody. This is a show for folks who want to enjoy their passions and their hobbies, whatever those might be, and genuinely strive to get better at doing stuff and more knowledgeable about the world around them. That, to me, is the essence of Dadliness. For that reason, we welcome cultural but non-practicing dads of all stripes, no matter your gender, orientation, or relationship to biological children.

I love talking to people about things they care about, so for now, every episode will revolve around an interview with somebody I’ve been dying to talk to. The first guest, Spencer Hall, is one of my favorite sportswriters out there, a keen observer of the strange and wonderful world of college football in particular and a Dad to boot. We chat about the definition of “hoss,” football and its place in American society, and the joy of painting Warhammer 40,000 miniatures, a Dad-coded hobby if ever there was one. The second, Ben Fowlkes, is another one of my favorite writers, a longtime scribe covering the world of mixed martial arts and a capital-W Writer. We discuss the benefits of having a home gym, what happened to Conor McGregor and why combat sports always eat their own, and of course, Master and Commander.

In future interviews, I talk with historian and fitness enthusiast Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, Defector flannel expert David Roth, the exceptional audio journalist and commentator Sam Sanders, and novelist Chad Dundas. These are all fascinating folks with a lot to say about the world, and though I’m biased, I think the conversations are pretty dang good.

So check out The Pursuit of Dadliness now. Open your favorite podcast app, search for the show, and subscribe - you won’t regret it, I promise.

I’m fond of the audiobook, which I read myself. You can listen to a sample on the Tides of History podcast feed. If you prefer to read, check out an excerpt hosted by the fine folks at Defector, a wonderful website created by the former staff of Deadspin, where I was lucky enough to write freelance pieces for a couple of years. I also wrote a fun tie-in piece for Defector (I’ll link to when it’s up) on Christopher Columbus as a replacement-level historical figure, so be sure to check that out as well.

Thanks to all of you for reading this newsletter, and for those of you reading the book, I hope you like it. Here’s one of Albrecht Dürer’s watercolors to send you on your way.

Subscribe now